Summary:

  • Lincolnshire County Council (LLC) needed to improve and expedite its operational and financial highways management processes, from initial defect reporting through to completion confirmation of the final repair. 
  • Over five years, the council saved more than £1.5m after using Confirm to replace old office systems. 
  • The use of Confirm Connect enables highways inspectors’ maintenance teams to spend longer in the field, without returning to the office between jobs to complete paperwork. 

Lincolnshire County Council has reported both time and resource savings when carrying out maintenance and repairs since adopting the new reporting system, from Brightly Software, a Siemens company. 

The enquiry form system, within Brightly’s Confirm asset management solution for local government, allows Highways Officers in Lincolnshire to address reports made by the public by creating forward planning briefs (FPB).  

FPB lists are automatically updated in the system, which streamlines the resource management process and ensures that issues are resolved in a timely manner. 

How it works 

Members of the public in Lincolnshire are able to report road-related issues to the council. Highways Officers in LCC can then create FPBs to set up a job for each reported issue. FPBs enable job timeframes and budgets to be allocated to a job and the system issues task orders to contractors who will execute the repairs. FPBs also enable the council to efficiently store vast amounts of information about jobs in a centralised system, including where and when they are taking place, and the completion status.  

Richard Fenwick, Head of Highways Asset Management at LCC, explains: “When a job gets raised, we calculate target costs for our service team. When the job is completed, we can look back and compare the estimate against what it ended up costing.”  

Confirm’s enquiry form system allows jobs to be viewed and filtered according to their status, date, priority level and electoral division, and it provides a visual map view showing the location of upcoming projects. It can be shared with teams within the council who are not linked to the highways management team, as well as external parties, such as contractors, thanks to Confirm’s capability to integrate with numerous other software such as Power BI.  

New and improved approach 

LCC started using Confirm for its asset management in 2010 and a few years ago, it rolled out the FPB system to centralise information about ongoing and future jobs, as well as improving collaboration. 

Fenwick explains: “Before we started using enquiry forms for our ongoing and future schemes, job information was stored in spreadsheets – typically one per team. This meant that within a certain area, the Programme Leader for carriageways, the Surfaces Treatments Manager and the Highways Manager would each have a spreadsheet of schemes. If a local manager wanted to know what was happening in that area, they would have to ask and review each of those spreadsheets.” 

The new approach, he says, is more efficient and consistent, saving the council more than £1.5m over five years. 

It ensures that only one job per issue is reported, rather than duplicates. For example, if a pothole is reported and an FPB is created for it, officers and contractors will see it in the system and will be aware that it’s being resolved.  

Efficiency first 

Fenwick says a key benefit of Confirm is its capability to be tailored to meet the needs of LCC’s highways management team. Indeed, this particular system was purpose-built to enable better monitoring of current and future jobs, as well as related resource planning, yet other local authorities in the UK are using the software differently. 

Ultimately, by continuing to respond to reports in a timely and cost-efficient manner, LCC is further improving the public’s trust in its capabilities, while a facilitating safe, thriving community.  

Learn more about Brightly Software’s Confirm: https://www.brightlysoftware.com/en-gb/products/confirm