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home > media > user spotlights > st. john's county, florida
St. Johns County, Florida
Improved Workflow Utilizing Cityworks
The Challenge
Before using Cityworks, St. Johns County’s Public Works Department worked in a reactive environment – they would get calls for service, send a crew out to fix the problem, and document everything on paper. Rocky Agbunag, Asset Management Coordinator at St. Johns County, explains, “During this time, we had literally stacks of paper work orders piling up each week. We needed a better system where we could manage and track our data more efficiently.”
When Joe Stephenson became Public Works Director in mid-2000, staff proposed the idea of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to manage the County’s assets. However, at the time, the County couldn’t get funding for the project. Not long afterwards, the Government Accounting Standards Board policy #34 (“GASB34”) became applicable, requiring that local governments manage their assets and track their finances using standards more like those of the private sector. These new requirements made the benefits of an integrated system capable of tracking assets, maintenance, and the resources required much more apparent. This would move the County away from processing and holding data in a paper environment which was hard to manage, difficult to organize, and time-consuming to query.
The Solution
While researching many different CMMS packages, St. Johns County focused on the GIS-centric nature of Cityworks. The County already had well established GIS capabilities and optimizing the use of a Geodatabase platform was judged to be very beneficial for the asset inventory. Since Cityworks could attach work orders directly to assets, having one main Geodatabase would reduce system maintenance and overhead costs. More research into Cityworks and more work with Azteca representatives convinced them that the program was flexible enough to meet their needs. The County also needed a planning and performance-based budgeting tool to go along with their maintenance management system. As a result, Azteca decided to write a new budgeting tool as part of Cityworks which St. Johns County could use for their budgeting needs.
St. Johns County Public Works Department began implementing Cityworks in September of 2005 and officially went live with Cityworks in October 2006, the beginning of their 2007 fiscal year. The County utilizes 27 seats of Cityworks Desktop, 27 seats of Cityworks Anywhere, 4 seats of Storeroom, 4 seats of the Pavement Management Interface with MicroPAVER, and 5 seats of Document Management interfaced with Hyland Software’s OnBase. Cityworks Anywhere is the County’s newest addition and is now used extensively throughout the organization from office desktops to field laptops. The performance-based budgeting tool was successfully designed and now operates within Cityworks allowing the County’s users to track costs associated with asset types and work order activities.
Results
St. Johns County has been very pleased with the results they have experienced utilizing Cityworks. Gail Oliver, St. Johns County Surveyor, states, “Our implementation of Cityworks went well and the results of the system have exceeded our expectations. Our use of Cityworks has brought high technology into job duties that previously did not involve technology, greatly improving the accuracy and efficiency of our Public Works Department. GIS technicians, Public Works staff, supervisors, and field crew are able to get on the same level and use and embrace the same technology. Many of us here at the County thought this would be the biggest challenge of the project, but it became the easiest. Now that we can use the planning and performance-based budgeting tool to manage our finances more effectively, it makes the software even better.”
The St. Johns Utilities Department recently began implementing Cityworks and is eagerly awaiting the benefits the software will provide. In the future, the Public Works Department plans to expand to Cityworks Server and the County wants to further implement Cityworks throughout the organization so all County departments are operating on a consistent system.
About St. John's County
St. Johns County is located in the northeast corner of Florida and is part of the Greater Jacksonville Metropolitan area. St. Johns County is one of the highest income counties in the nation and is home to some of the country’s most beautiful beaches. With a population of about 175,000, the county experienced high growth rates in the last decade as many residents working in Jacksonville have built new homes across the county line.
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