Blacktop Construction Limited is a successful family-owned road surfacing, maintenance and construction company with over 130 employees, based in the Waikato and Auckland regions. The company has four large-scale road maintenance and surfacing contracts with local authorities valued at approximately $30 million per year, placing Blacktop among the top five largest road maintenance service providers in New Zealand.

The company also provides surfacing and road construction services to many private clients throughout the greater Auckland and Waikato regions and has surfacing contracts stretching from Timaru to Oamaru in the South Island.

Challenge
With four key local government contracts, Blacktop faced a challenge in the data capture of road faults in the field; prioritising, managing and reporting on the status of repairs; and tracking actual performance against contractual requirements.

As Jim Matangi, Road Maintenance Manager at Blacktop, explains, “The management of a typical maintenance contract requires contractors to inspect roads, identify and log faults in a central system and then track the status of those reports through to completion.

“To service these contracts, we needed a robust solution to meet internal management requirements and to achieve everything our clients stipulated within their contract documents,” says Matangi.

Blacktop also required a solution which would improve client access to maintenance database information. The solution needed to be web-based with the ability to integrate with offsite client systems, including client call centres, databases and consultant systems.

“We wanted to improve our overall service delivery to clients by improving the way we manage each individual task in our Network Management System and by giving the client access to this information through the internet. Key performance indicators also needed to be built into the system based on the individual contract requirements, both for our clients and for ourselves to view how we were tracking against service level agreements,” says Matangi.

Solution
Blacktop chose a combination of FrontRange Solutions’ HEAT service management solution through FrontRange partner, Olympic Software, and a mobility solution from Orbiz International.

Orbiz’s mobile workforce application enables contractors to identify and record road faults in the field, including digital photographs, via Telecom T3G Harrier smartphones.

This information is then transferred into HEAT, where each fault is logged and a response time calculated based on the individual contractual requirements.

“Our choice of FrontRange HEAT was partially cost driven, but also partly due to the support of the sales team, who went out of their way to demonstrate and convince us that HEAT was the right solution for our requirements. Another attractive feature of HEAT was Olympic Software training our staff to be administrators so we didn’t necessarily require the services of expensive software developers or consultants to make future modifications to tailor HEAT,” explains Matangi.

Olympic Software aided Blacktop in ensuring interoperability between the Orbiz system and HEAT, and Blacktop’s existing backend infrastructure.

“We also chose Olympic Software because they have a good knowledge of local authority requirements and are a proven software solution provider, which was important to us,” says Matangi.

Blacktop commenced HEAT training in September 2004 and has since rolled the system out to users covering the four maintenance contracts.

Results
Since implementing HEAT, Blacktop has significantly enhanced its performance measurement capabilities.

Once faults are logged, HEAT automatically calculates the contractual response time based on specific variables, and the fault and road types.

“This will also enable us to compare our actual performance against contractual requirements and provide better KPI reports to the clients in the future,” explains Matangi.

Improved access to clear, accurate fault and contractual response information has enabled Blacktop to increase the transparency of service it offers to clients.

“Using HEAT, we not only track every task in the system, but we can also view work-in-progress and future program values on a monthly basis,” said Matangi.

“At the same time, we can provide our clients with reports to indicate anticipated areas of maintenance expenditure, thus enabling the authorities to factor this spending into their budgets.”

On the horizon
“Beyond the next 12 months, Blacktop plans to enable data to be transferred into HEAT from remote locations via wireless and could enable HEAT to dispatch calls to the Harrier smartphones in the field,” says Matangi.

For more information
www.blacktop.co.nz

Orbiz International
Karen Hielkema, 09 309 6566
karen@orbiz.biz

March 2005