Single integrated solution leads to dramatic cost savings and public service improvements

Windsor, Berks, 26 January 2011 - Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) - a global leader in location intelligence, data management and customer communication management software, data and services - today announced that Lincolnshire County Council has successfully consolidated its roads engineering asset management and maintenance management systems into one integrated software solution.

Confirm®, PBBI's market-leading infrastructure asset maintenance and management system, has enabled the rationalisation of Lincolnshire's legacy systems into a single resilient system, which will realise cost efficiencies of £1 million plus over 10 years.

Lincolnshire County Council manages 9,000km of road network and manages over 121,000 assets. Prior to this project, asset data was held in silos without any links between the systems. The administration of the term maintenance contract, specialist asset management contracts (e.g. Bridges and Street Lighting) and the Traffic Management Act (TMA) was also carried out by isolated IT systems. This asset data is now shared across all relevant departments, with over 400 users active on the new system including council-based Highways, Lighting, Structures, Street Works and UKPMS Officers and staff from the two main highways term maintenance contractors.

Confirm has been integrated with key business applications such as Lincolnshire's contractor system, SAP Financials and the CRM system. Calls from the public can be dealt with more efficiently at the first point of contact by customer service operatives - for instance, reporting a faulty street light or pedestrian hazard - without needing to go through to the back office, thus saving time and resources and improving accuracy. Operatives can quickly pinpoint the location of a problem using MapInfo Stratus mapping from PBBI, which provides customer service centre staff with a real time view of all assets and activity on the Lincolnshire road network. Information on street works being carried out within Lincolnshire is also now available to the public by an interface to the national Elgin system.

Confirm enables jobs to be automatically generated directly from the enquiry with no duplication of paperwork or effort - these can then be sent to field workers' mobile devices so that they can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Updating jobs on mobile devices can also automatically generate Street Works Notices. This means that less administrative time is spent on tasks such as re-keying data and processing paperwork, enabling Highways teams to concentrate on core maintenance activities in the field, ultimately delivering a better service to citizens.

"Lincolnshire's highways network spans one of the UK's largest and most rural counties, so enabling the customer service centre to visually pinpoint the location of a fault on a map as opposed to a text description dramatically increases the accuracy of information we can provide to contractors," comments Matt Relf, HAMS Project Manager, Lincolnshire County Council. "By cutting over 30 solutions for various aspects of highways asset management down to one single system, Confirm lets us adopt a much more integrated and holistic approach to highways management and maintenance. This has not only improved our direct service to the public, but has also freed up Highways' staff to allow them to devote more time to the maintenance of highways assets."

"We're very excited to see Lincolnshire's success in streamlining its highways asset management processes and improving its business processes," adds Dominic McNeillis, Confirm Product Marketing Manager, PBBI. "The Council's cohesive vision for its highways asset management strategy is exactly what Confirm is designed to enable, and it is great to see Confirm delivering measurable cost savings alongside efficiency improvements."

Lincolnshire County Council is continuing to roll out different functionalities within Confirm, across other departments, with full deployment scheduled for completion in 2011. Future plans include further enhancements of the mapping functionality on its website using PBBI's MapInfo Stratus solution, which will enable citizens to report faults on an interactive map without the need to call the customer service centre.