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Three Case Studies
Cochise County, AZ; Richland Country, MT and
Chenango, NY
PubWorks users are smart,
conscientious and take their responsibilities very
seriously. As administrative and clerical staff in
government agencies, they are responsible for their
departments’ ability to report to the county or town
boards and ultimately, and sometimes directly, to
the taxpaying public on how funds are being used to
maintain roads. Here is how three public works
administrators have put PubWorks to
work. You’ll note some common threads in all three
cases.
Teri Arreola works for the Cochise County Highway Department,
a large rural county in southeast
Arizona. The Highway Department has 77 employees,
not including administrative staff.
Teri has to make regular reports to the board of
supervisors and must respond to queries from other
department members and even the general public. She
needs to provide rapid and accurate answers to
questions about spending and activity and the status
of service calls.
Two steps prior to purchasing PubWorks,
Teri was keeping track of project costs using
spreadsheets. As her department became busier the
need for a budgeting tool became urgent. They first
tried a package available from the state of Arizona
but were disappointed with it. Teri began a search
of available public works software packages,
discovered PubWorks and downloaded a
free demo copy.
Understandably, Teri was cautious and worked with
this demo copy of PubWorks for quite a
while to evaluate its quality, suitability and ease
of use. When she was satisfied, Cochise County
purchased the software and had Tracker Software
populate it with their project history and road
data. Teri then entered materials. She found it easy
to use the PubWorks data entry
screens. Now that she had real data in the system,
Teri tested the software for another two months
before ‘going live.’ She states that this testing
phase could have been much briefer but after having
been ”burned” once, she was determined to leave
nothing to chance in terms of software reliability,
usability and accuracy.
PubWorks passed Teri’s tests and she
has been using it for more than two years. She is
enthusiastic about how PubWorks has
performed. She has absolute confidence in the
accuracy and relevance of her reports to the
supervisors and other department members. She finds
the software extremely user friendly. “PubWorks
gives me what I need quickly.” She can answer
questions from citizens on the fly and generate and
email reports to colleagues in minutes. She likes
that she can pull together the data requested and
email it the requestor without having to fuss with
copies and hand delivering. She feels that the
taxpayers are better served because with
PubWorks’ ease of use and flexibility she
can respond to their queries while they are still on
the phone.
Teri says, “It’s a really good program, it just
makes life simple! And the technical support is
awesome.”
Collette Smith is responsible for cost accounting
clerical duties in the Richland County Department of
Public Works in Montana. Her department maintains
12,000 miles of roads in a county with a population
of 10,000.
Similar to Teri, Collette is responsible for
tracking how taxpayer money is spent. She needs to
be able to report who did what, with what materials
and what equipment. Her information is reported to
the county commissioners and the public works
director. Her reporting is mostly answering ad hoc
questions as opposed to routine periodic reports. As
such she needs to have data on projects, employees,
equipment and materials available and easy to
retrieve.
Collette switched to PubWorks from an
obsolete program that was no longer supported by the
original developers. She too finds PubWorks
intuitive to use. Because of her comfort level with
computer software in general and the fact that
PubWorks is “so self-explanatory,” she
required no training assistance.
Collette has been using PubWorks since
September of 2004. She finds it easy and quick to do
her routine data entry. All labor, equipment and
materials pertinent to a particular job can be
entered on the same screen. She used to have to make
several passes through each worker’s timesheet to
enter each of these elements on a separate screen.
While data entry is simple and quick, data retrieval
is very flexible. She likes that “there are multiple
ways” of getting the data necessary to answer a
question.” This flexibility allows her to zero in on
answers in a highly effective manner. For example,
if asked “Who had the last run with a certain piece
of equipment” Collette can open the equipment window
for that unit and from there click on the Activity
tab which provides the answer. She doesn’t have to
construct a query or new report and then trawl
through columns of irrelevant data to find what she
needs. This flexibility in data retrieval works
particularly well for Collette, given the wide
variety of information requests that she receives.
Collette enjoys the fact that she can customize
PubWorks easily herself or with the help
of technical support. Like Teri, Collette loves that
PubWorks works as expected and her
data is accurate.
Joy Kasmarcik has been with the City of Chenango, NY
Highway Department for over ten years. Joy purchased
PubWorks earlier this year because,
after working with the demo software that she’d
downloaded at
www.trackersoftwarecorp.com, she was
convinced it would help her successfully maintain
call records, document work orders, manage data and
historical records, maintain accountability, and
manage payroll records all while being easy to use
and very flexible.
Like Collette, Joy installed PubWorks
and trained herself. With many public works software
packages; expensive on-site installation and
training are essential. Joy’s experience with the
demo version of PubWorks convinced her
that she, too, could handle these tasks herself.
Joy has taken advantage of the PubWorks’
flexibility by creating her own drop down lists for
tracking calls and work orders. This customization
greatly simplifies taking a call, assigning a work
order and tracking results and costs. Crew and
management reports based on the customized data are
easily created and highly valuable.
Joy is very proud of the Highway Department’s
ability to provide accountability to the Town of
Chenango, the Supervisor, Town Council and
ultimately the voters. PubWorks
reports let Chenango see how money is allocated to
resources like manpower and material and how
activities and results measure up to quality
standards. PubWorks’ reports allow the
Highway Superintendent to take a more pro-active
role in allocating resources and maximizing
efficiency.
Specifically, Joy uses PubWorks
reports that provide information needed to:
• Apply for NY CHIPS grants
• Apply for regional sharing of services.
• Comply with GASB 34 requirements
• Track estimated vs. actual life of a project
• Compare costs by asset, such as maintenance costs
for dirt vs. paved roads
What Joy likes best of all is that PubWorks
gives her all this power with a savings of time and
effort.
Would you like to share how you are using
PubWorks? We would love to get your story
for our next newsletter.
Not yet using PubWorks? Why not try
the software and see the possibilities for yourself…
download a free demo copy at
www.TrackerSoftwareCorp.com/PWDemo.exe
Or for more information, please contact
Philip
McGrath at (719) 264-1850.
Table of Contents Volume
2, Edition 2
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