Driving Michigan

Orange cones once meant maddening traffic delays for Michigan drivers and late payments to contractors.

What's more, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) discovered its road projects were unnecessarily costing the state millions. Thanks to a partnership with a software company in Gainesville, Fla., the state solved its road woes while creating a product that could potentially help other states address theirs.

The MDOT found itself in this unpleasant situation as a result of several intertwined factors. For starters, a budget crunch in the mid- '90s resulted in personnel cutbacks for the MDOT.

"I got here in '95, and the department was re-engineering," said Doug Couto, agency services information officer for transportation and several other Michigan agencies. "They cut 40 percent of the staff as part of that re-engineering. Then there was an early retirement, so we lost people through that as part of a budget reduction. At the same time, the state increased the gas tax. It got more federal money. So it had the effect of doubling the throughput -- the amount of work we were doing. We would have had to add a substantial amount of people to the programs."

The combination of budget, personnel and project management issues made the department vulnerable to costly errors. The department's time-consuming road projects also required processing various types of paper-based data gathered from construction sites, which increased error potential.

To alleviate congestion and devise a more error-proof construction management process, Michigan partnered with Info Tech of Gainesville, Fla., a software-design and marketing company, to devise a technology solution.

The partnership yielded the development of FieldManager -- a suite of construction management applications designed to track construction data and monitor project progress, said Couto.

"To ensure the state is getting what it paid for, an inspector does the daily report and says, 'There were 20 people on the job. This much cement was delivered. They removed this much dirt. They put in this certain feet of guardrail,'" he explained. "The information is logged and put in the software, and the field inspector goes back to the office to download the information onto the central server."


Nuts and Bolts
The suite can be installed either as a stand-alone on a laptop or on a client/server and accessed over a network. Once FieldManager is installed on a laptop, department staff or contractors can use them in the field to manage construction projects.

"Some of them have custom-built mounts for their laptops," said Couto. "One guy has a mount that fits over his steering wheel, so he sits in the driver's seat and does his work. Another guy has a tabletop mount next to him. They can take it out and go sit under a tree."

The MDOT and Info Tech developed FieldManager -- for laptops only at this point -- using Sybase PowerBuilder, a database design tool that allows users to work in specific environments. Beyond PowerBuilder, however, is another Sybase product that allows developers to design applications specifically for smaller devices.

"We provide a database at the enterprise level where you can show the large volumes," said Raj Nathan, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Platform Group at Sybase. "Plus, we provide a small database that is in sync with the enterprise database on the small device itself. This database is actually already built into Pocket PowerBuilder, so when people develop the application, there is already a database within that environment for them to go test it out, put it in there and have it that way."

Using Pocket PowerBuilder, an application designed at the enterprise level can be deployed on small devices in the field. Developers can be confident that what they see during the design phase will appear the