DUBUQUE, Iowa- Cartegraph, a leader in infrastructure management software, is pleased to announce the winners of their 2020-2021 High-Performance Operations Awards, as well as their Flag Forward Awards. The prestigious honors recognize government agencies, utilities, parks and educational institutions for creating safer, more sustainable and more resilient communities through smart infrastructure management.
The following 14 organizations stood out as thought leaders for their innovative use of infrastructure data, efficient work order management, commitment to sustainability, and responsiveness to citizen requests. The winners were honored in front of 1,000 of their peers during the CarteCon Online virtual awards ceremony.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE OPERATIONS AWARDS
Collier County, Florida
The Collier County road maintenance, GIS and asset management teams are always looking for ways to work smarter and drive efficiency through their infrastructure management efforts. In 2020, they developed a solution to capture their work order and resource usage data more efficiently. By using Cartegraph’s Automation Manager feature, the team significantly reduced the time they were spending on data entry and increased productivity across the board. With this change, their street sweeper operators were able to clean twice as many miles and remove three times as much debris.
Town of Windsor, Colorado
Steady population growth is driving the need for smarter infrastructure management in the Town of Windsor. With an 84% increase in total lane miles managed since 2013 and nearly a thousand new dwelling units built in 2020 alone, the public works team turned to technology to capture critical operations data. By using Cartegraph software to track everything from snowstorm response and pothole repair to street sweeping and traffic control device management, the Streets Division has the numbers they need to build and defend budget increases, prioritize projects and communicate results to management and citizens.
City of Olathe, Kansas
The City of Olathe is focused on leveraging data and technology to guide their infrastructure rehabilitation efforts. The wastewater collections team is leveraging the Cartegraph application programming interface (Rest API) to pull in their WinCan inspection data and measure the business risk exposure of their sewer assets. Through data analysis, the team discovered that it would take over 2,000 years to rehabilitate their system at current funding levels. They’re using this data to prioritize infrastructure plans and build their business case for capital improvement plan funding. Meanwhile, the water distribution team is tracking the impact of water shutdowns for construction projects. In 2020, they spent $72,000 in combined resources on these events. With their Cartegraph data, they’re able to build accurate budgets and work more efficiently.
City of Santa Barbara, California
In 2017, nearly half of the streets in the City of Santa Barbara were rated at risk, poor or failed. When voters passed a 1-cent sales tax to help improve their streets, the public works team set out to build a more proactive street maintenance program. Using data in Cartegraph, they identified high-value tasks that should be done in-house and low-value services that could be outsourced. For example, the cost for a contractor to pave one block is over $110,000. Excluding labor and overhead costs, a city crew can pave the same block for only $36,000. Armed with this information, the team is prioritizing their time and improving their streets—collecting positive feedback from happy residents along the way.
City of Wilsonville, Oregon
The future is bright in Wilsonville where the Public Works Department is converting 3,000 of the city’s streetlights to LED bulbs. Equipped with Cartegraph One on their iPads, contractors captured replacement data in real time. The team also created an automated follow-up process to schedule inspections and ensure that the new bulbs are working properly. With phase one of this project complete, the city is enjoying a 76% reduction in electricity costs on the converted streetlights.
Village of Buffalo Grove, Illinois
With five employees retiring early amid the pandemic, the Village of Buffalo Grove found themselves short-staffed for the 2020 snow and ice season. This challenge led the team to work smarter: consolidating plow routes, hiring a contractor to supplement their response and using Cartegraph to stay organized. Instead of looking at a binder at the shop or calling up a crew leader, drivers can easily locate their routes on their phones. Crew leaders no longer need to physically check in with plow drivers. Moreover, the communication team can quickly share storm response information on social media—keeping the residents informed while freeing up the phone lines. In addition to streamlined communication, the team uses the data to provide village leaders with immediate answers on storm details and costs.
City of Waynesboro, Virginia
Located on a Chesapeake Bay headwaters tributary, the City of Waynesboro takes wastewater treatment very seriously. They used Cartegraph to capture an accurate inventory of the equipment at their treatment plant and eight pump stations—eliminating the need to search through filing cabinets or spreadsheets to look up when assets were last serviced. With a goal of reducing time spent on corrective maintenance, the team set up nearly 200 preventative maintenance plans and created a dashboard to see whether they were tracking toward their 80-20 planned to reactive maintenance ratio. The team is using this operations data to develop annual budgets and prioritize spending for their treatment plant infrastructure.
Cobb County, Georgia
With over 2,400 miles of roadway and a growing backlog of resurfacing needs, the Cobb County Department of Transportation needed to get buy-in from elected officials and citizens for an increased budget. The pandemic limited public meetings where these conversations normally took place, so the team turned to technology to help share the information. Using Cartegraph’s Scenario Builder feature, they modeled multiple scenarios to demonstrate resurfacing needs and prioritize projects. Through data visualization and interactive ArcGIS web maps, the department justified their requests—ultimately securing $213 million to invest in their road network.
City of Colorado Springs, Colorado
The City of Colorado Springs kicked off 2021 facing a new law that required their team to respond to every utility locate request within 48 hours. With over 100,000 of these requests annually, this was a tall order. Already using the Colorado 811 system and Cartegraph operations management software, the public works department decided to integrate the two systems to help meet this requirement. In the first four months of using the integration, the city efficiently responded to more than 15,000 locate requests and saved more than $19,000 in labor costs.
State of North Carolina—Department of Administration/State Property Office
With over 1 million acres of real estate, 12,000 buildings, and 4.9 million square feet of leased office and warehouse space, the three-person facilities information team for the State of North Carolina has their hands full. Looking for a way to centralize their property portfolio data, they teamed up with Patrick Engineering and implemented Cartegraph’s facilities management software. With a complete and accurate inventory of their real estate, the department can now track their space utilization data down to the individual floor plan, dispose of underutilized assets and create multi-year property plans. By integrating with other state information systems and gaining access to the key performance indicator reporting in Cartegraph, the department is saving over 2,000 labor hours annually.
FLAG FORWARD AWARDS
Launched in 2017, the Flag Forward award winners are handpicked by Cartegraph CEO Josh Mallamud. Inspired by the Cartegraph flag, these awards are intended to recognize organizations that are challenging the status quo and revolutionizing the industry. There are four recipients this year.
University of Notre Dame
In 2020, the university facilities information team at Notre Dame made significant progress toward their vision of getting the right data to the right people to support the best use of university facilities. They created a custom tool to strengthen their COVID-19 emergency planning and response efforts, track critical sanitation and disinfectant assets, and estimate safe occupancy rates across campus. Throughout the year, Notre Dame also used Cartegraph’s indirect cost recovery tools to coordinate the update of more than 500 research labs across campus and configured several custom asset inventory and asset manager fields to better support university operations.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
In the midst of the pandemic, the Pittsburgh Department of Innovation and Performance, Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, and Department of Public Works teamed up to drastically expand their asset inventory. Together, they focused on capturing and assessing 43,000 streetlights, 22,000 utility poles, 23,000 ADA ramps, over 150 miles of trails, and hundreds of storm outlets. Armed with this new data in Cartegraph, the city is analyzing their assets to improve the accessibility of their pedestrian network, meet MS4 compliance, enhance parks and improve their public safety response.
Kansas City, Missouri
When the going gets tough and resources are tight, the street lighting services team in Kansas City never backs down. Rather than proposing service reductions amid the global pandemic, the team used Cartegraph data to build a cost-saving proposal for converting 80,000 high-intensity discharge streetlights to LED. By upgrading their streetlights, the city will not only save money and energy, but also reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions—a smart, sustainable solution for their community.
Lakewood, Colorado
The City of Lakewood was looking to extend its digital transformation to their indoor assets. However, with more than 1,000 assets in each of their buildings, individually loading this data would have been time consuming and inefficient. They teamed up with Cartegraph’s industry-leading services team and Patrick Engineering to build location-based floor plans and conduct facility condition assessments. Today, they’re using Cartegraph’s facilities management software to manage requests and work, build maintenance plans, manage vendor quotes, track repair costs and even develop capital forecasting plans.
ABOUT CARTEGRAPH
Cartegraph builds safer, more resilient and sustainable communities through better stewardship of critical infrastructure. They offer powerful, intuitive SaaS solutions that help government agencies, utilities and educational institutions manage their physical assets and associated operations. With Cartegraph software, users optimize the life of their infrastructure, deploy maintenance resources efficiently and increase productivity to drive high-performance operations. For more information, visit cartegraph.com.
