Software powers facilities & waste management efficiency
July 9 2007

Powys County Council has been working closely with strategic partner, ROCC, to deliver the council’s commitment to e-government. The council has installed modular business support software that has transformed the management and operational function of the building services, planned maintenance and waste management departments.

ROCC’s Uniclass Enterprise software has been applied to a range of office and field-based services that embraces elements from initial call-logging by customer services to live interfacing with PDAs that staff carry with them throughout the extensive rural county.

Construction Procurement and Premises Manager, David Bradley, has been helping to take forward the council’s commitment to e-government for some years. “ROCC don’t stand still, they move forward and that’s what we want from a strategic partner,” explains Bradley. Restructuring of the authority sparked the need for change, Bradley recalls, with several drivers for a systems review coming into focus – the need for direct interface to the county’s financial system, the opportunity to remove paper invoice and payment streams, the requirement for a system capable of adapting to larger schemes and projects involving multiple contractors and orders, and the need to improve maintenance management by including service contracts and planned maintenance.

Mobile working has been an important aspect of the evolution into
e-government, Bradley explains. Powys stretches 110 miles north to south, with no motorways to help shorten travel times. It can take two and a half hours to drive that distance – “three hours on a bad day” Operatives can be up to 40 to 50 miles from base. “Coming back to collect paperwork for a job did not represent efficient use of time” Bradley comments. But that’s become a thing of the past since the introduction of hand-held PDAs, he goes on. Facilities managers out in the field use these customised i-packs, which act as a browser, allowing them to view jobs and update their status, modify data, deal with applications and add timesheet information online.

“The PDAs make tasks such as paper orders, signing tickets and paper timesheets redundant,” Bradley states, “and there’s no need to travel to base to pick up paperwork. It’s a live environment now.”

“We also needed a front-end maintenance management system that logged calls, processed and monitored jobs, developed a property database, took away the paperwork and provided live links to those out in the field. We started with a clean sheet of paper and called in ROCC again,” Bradley explains.

The success of the application in the building services and planned maintenance departments prompted Powys to install ROCC’s Uniclass Waste Management (UWM) system. UWM allows Powys to run an intelligent waste contact centre for appointments, rounds, lists, collections and document management. The system also allows invoices for waste services such as bulk collections to be raised by the ‘back-office’ software and issued to clients – further reinforcing Powys’ commitment to e-government. “It’s all part of an e-financial central package,” Bradley adds.

Other rurally-based local authorities are eagerly viewing developments in Powys and the expectation is that some may well move along similar lines. “We are reasonably ahead with e-government,” Bradley says. The partnership with ROCC and the focus on “constant development” is working well, he acknowledges. “We’ve built on ROCC’s expertise, now we’re moving on again with a constant vision of improving on paper systems - grabbing at the technology and evolving it.”