Forsyth County, with the help of BOSS Solutions, has implemented a cloud based 811 ticketing solution BOSS811 to replace a costly web-based service for managing utility service marking/location requests.
The state of Georgia has a central service where citizens can call 811 to have utility services lines marked before doing any construction or digging. The state office determines the local agencies responsible for providing those utility services and notifies that local agency about the utility marking request.
Forsyth County used a web-based vendor to track these service requests and to transmit status updates back to the state agency. The county paid the vendor for each service request posted on the vendor’s website, and there are 100-200 service requests each week. This web-based service was very limited, had no reporting functions and had no workflow to monitor/manage service requests.
BOSS Solutions worked closely with Forsyth County to replace the existing service request listing website with web services to receive an XML data feed from the Georgia state agency and turn that into Support Central tickets. Forsyth County water utility service crews use Support Central in the field to manage service requests. They have dashboard reports to list any emergency service requests and to show service requests in estimated completion date order. When service requests are completed, the Support Central web services transmit updates back to the Georgia state agency. We call the new BOSS Solutions application “BOSS811”.
The new BOSS811 service provides all of the functionality of the website listing service and more. Support Central has workflow to monitor ticket status and escalate unassigned tickets. Timesheets can be used to track the time spent on each service request. Service crew workload can be tracked as tickets are assigned to crew members.
An additional benefit was quickly realized when the county GIS department was able to use geo-location data in the XML data stream to produce electronic maps showing all of the service requests. This allows the water utility staff to efficiently plan their workload.
BOSS Solutions was able to react to the new technology from the state agency (the XML data stream) and incorporate that into the existing ticket system to produce a solid and reliable solution for our water utility department.
BOSS Solutions is a U.S. Company providing innovative software solutions to meet the need of customers in service management. The company’s major product lines are BOSSDesk that provides IT Service Management on the Cloud, BOSS Support Central – that provides IT Service Management On-Premise, and BOSS811 a one call ticket management solution for the damage prevention industry.
Rick Young
IT Manager
Forsyth County, GA
(BOSS thanks Rick Young for contributing to this blog)