North Ayrshire Council transforms grounds maintenance processes
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In creating a standardised process for scheduling grounds maintenance works, North Ayrshire Council has improved its efficiency and responsiveness to urgent issues.
North Ayrshire Council has introduced a fully-automated approach to scheduling routine grounds maintenance works that has completely transformed traditional ways of working. Weekly lists of routine tasks, such as grass cutting and hedge trimming, are generated automatically using an ArcPy Python Script and sent directly to employees’ tablets using Esri’s Workforce for ArcGIS, with no manual intervention at all, delivering significant improvements in efficiency for the council.
The use of Workforce for ArcGIS in the field creates a standard way of working for three regional teams, for the first time, but has been sympathetically developed to allow employees to work autonomously and adapt their schedules based on local conditions. Grounds maintenance operators can, therefore, draw on their own experience to defer grass cutting if a prolonged dry spell makes it unnecessary or wait for a dry day to weed flower beds. A proximity feature on Workforce for ArcGIS alerts staff when they are near the locations of other jobs, enabling them to plan their days more productively and save time and petrol.
The council is now integrating its new process for routine grounds maintenance with its Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to help it respond more quickly to ad hoc and urgent requests for maintenance. If a customer phones the contact centre to report broken glass in a playground, for example, a grounds maintenance task will be automatically generated and sent to the relevant team using Workforce for ArcGIS. Within as little as ten minutes, the maintenance request could be with the correct person, in the right location, enabling the safety of parks to be improved very quickly.
“ArcGIS has enabled us to automate our grounds maintenance processes, improving our efficiency and ability to deliver fast, high quality services for citizens”