Yotta has won a major contract with Northumberland County Council for the delivery and implementation of Yotta’s flagship connected asset management platform, Alloy. The council plans to use Alloy for the management of its highways infrastructure, enabling it to inspect and maintain its whole network more efficiently and drive enhanced engagement with the public across the authority.
The council will use Alloy for highways infrastructure asset management activities across Northumberland, with an initial focus on highways inspections and raising defects. The use of the software will allow the council to flexibly add and manage multiple highways assets and asset types within its overall highways maintenance model; automate workflow processes and improve communication both across teams and between the council and the public.
Added to this, Alloy also gives the council a strong interface to customer services and enhanced visualisation of its highways data, including multiple views of datasets which in turn supports the quality of the decision-making process. Northumberland County Council also receive the benefit of a future-proofed system as Alloy has been built from the ground up in the latest modern technologies.
Kris Westerby, Highways Delivery Manager, Northumberland County Council, said: “We are longstanding customers of Yotta’s Mayrise software. We have always been pleased with the reliability of the system and its capability in terms of mapping and maintaining our highways inventory. Upgrading to Alloy takes our functionality up another level, giving us greater flexibility; improved usability and user experience; better interfaces with systems across the authority and the ability to respond more quickly and efficiently to fulfil operational needs.
“We can get really granular detail out of the system. Each query or request we have can be readily captured within Alloy, enabling us to easily ‘slice and dice’ the data, for example, and work out what volume and percentage of enquiries come from each individual neighbourhood or ward.
“The main benefit for us is Alloy’s customer interface and how well it we see it linking with our customer service operations in the future,” added Westerby. “That’s key because we are always focused on engaging more closely with the public across the county and using Alloy will enable us to do this by capturing their requests more rapidly; resolving their queries more quickly and giving them faster feedback. In the future, if you go to log a pothole on our system, you should be able to see whether it has already been reported and what the response time is likely to be, for example.”
The upgrade from Mayrise to Alloy is now well underway, with user acceptance testing currently in progress. Once Alloy is live, the council are implementing Alloy Mobile which will allow inspectors and field workers out on site to be fed all the latest information direct to their mobile devices from the Alloy back office system. This will enable the most important tasks to be prioritised and updates to be delivered as soon as work is completed, driving enhanced operational efficiencies and greater productivity as a direct result. Northumberland County Council will initially have a total of 26 mobile users, ranging from highways inspectors to site operatives and circa 24 back office staff who will be using Alloy.
Over time, Northumberland County Council hopes to extend the use of Alloy onto its broader, strategic capital maintenance programmes. Over time, Alloy could also potentially be used for other service areas, including street lighting, for example. Bryan Wood, Customer Relationship Manager, Yotta, said: “we are delighted to have this opportunity to work with Northumberland County Council on this key strategic project. It is critically important for the council to be able to react quickly to end customer queries. Alloy enables inspectors to action something on the ground, complete a task and then provide instant updates back to the customer. It is that ability to react quickly and keep all stakeholders instantly informed that is key to Alloy’s success.”
About Northumberland County Council.
Northumberland County Council is a unitary authority in North East England. The area of Northumberland is split into 67 electoral wards. The current council leader is Councillor Peter Jackson. For more information, please visit www.northumberland.gov.uk
