Customer Background

Street Scene was a new service that came together from combining a number of other services within Blackpool Council. These consisted of Highways (Inspection, Maintenance and Enforcement), Waste (Commercial and Domestic), Street Cleansing and the Neighbourhood action team. They used two main IT systems, an in-house written standalone complaints system and a highways management system procured from the local government software market. Alongside these systems were over 30 spreadsheets and small databases required to help the teams capture data to their requirements.

 

Business Needs

The new service was brought together so the Council could have a holistic service view of the street and it was soon realised that the current systems had a number of limitations:

• Standalone information systems with no workflow
• Double typing due to no integration
• No geocoding which meant lack of spatial data
• Difficult to get meaningful data from the systems
• Expensive licensing
• Work still being given out from printed daily job sheets
• Large overhead of administration managing the work
• Teams working with separate sets of data with no understanding what other teams were doing
• Teams reporting in/out of the main office at least twice a day

 

Solution and Delivery

After an initial scoping meeting the ESB platform was identified to replace the two main systems and all the spreadsheets and databases. Using the design principles set out below each process was systematically configured on the ESB platform. The ESB Business Rules engine was used to make decisions in the work flow to eliminate batching and queuing. The Street Scene teams were able to test and refine the system working within their normal environments supported by the Pentagull team.

The main design principles of the new system emerged after studying the work.

• Sustainability – needs to be flexible and configurable by the service
• Mobile – work needs to be moved in real time to the right person to do the work
• Accessibility – data needed to be presented so easily accessible
• Geographical Information – all enquires or inspections to be map based
• Electronic – all processes to be completely electronic
• Interoperability – capable to interface to other systems

 

Benefits

• Reduced end-to-end times on all work processes
• More repairs to the Blackpool Network
• Over £500k savings on administration of the work
• Software Licence costs reduced by 300%
• Real time accurate data that assist management to make better decisions

 

User Comments

“The communication between developer and end-user was second to none.” Paul Taylor, Assistant Director of Property and Street Scene

“The difference to how the service now operates compared to before we had ESB is phenomenal, not only are we able to do so much more we are doing it much quicker as well.” Jez Evans, Street Scene Manager

 “We were looking for a technological solution that captured a request for service, collated the requests, issued jobs to the front-line workforce and enabled each change in job status to be logged and monitored and provided accurate, timely and complete management information.” Paul Taylor, Assistant Director of Property and Street Scene

 

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