Each new section that was moved into the street division brought its own work management or tracking system.
"We ended up with about four different work management tools, some were homegrown, some mainframe," said Elizabeth Mueller, information systems manager for the division. "So a little over four years ago, we took the opportunity to reengineer the way we did business. We needed a better way to track our work resources, our assets, the requests from the citizens, and to ensure that all parts of the division -- with its 370 employees -- could function together."
Mueller and Jonathan Levy, the deputy director who ran operations, looked for a solution to help manage the division's varied responsibilities better. This is when the idea of synergy came to the fore.
"It started more as a philosophy or a methodology than a project name," Mueller said. "We wanted to become exactly that -- more synergistic. We found a lot of software that specialized in street infrastructure or road signs, but we wanted something that could track everything. We needed a way to integrate all the information with our crews so they are not out paving a street one week, and the following week another crew was going out to dig up that very street. We had to find a solution that allowed everybody in the division to know what everyone else was doing. That was the genesis of the whole project we ended up calling Project Synergy."
They considered either customizing an existing specialized package or using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. One problem, Mueller said, is that because technology moves so fast, an agency often must replace the solution before the expected five years is up, because the solution no longer meets agency need.
"That can get very costly," she said. "We were trying to find a solution that could evolve and expand, and that we wouldn't have to replace. For that reason, when we looked out at different management systems, we were leaning toward a true ERP system that encompassed a lot more than one specific area."
One ERP application sold by SAP caught their eye because it could interface with other software packages. Their timing couldn't have been better. SAP had just announced a partnership with ESRI, which supplied the GIS software the city was already using for spatial applications.
"We thought, 'Why don't we try integrating these together?'" said Mueller. "No one had done that yet, but we forged a three-way partnership to accomplish it -- SAP, ESRI and the city. That is one thing that made this project so unique from a technical standpoint.
"In about a year, working in partnership, San Diego, SAP and ESRI took these two huge software packages and brought them together so they could talk together in real time through a very thin client, which made it very fast," she said.
Linking the two software applications gave the department a spatial reference to all work planned and done. Staff could simply go to a map, click on any one of their assets at a particular location -- a streetlight, road, tree -- and get immediate access to SAP data showing all work completed at that location, any outstanding requests and work orders, and any other relevant information.
Realization of the project's goal was beginning -- true synergy, the ability for everybody in the division to know what everyone else is doing.
However, all of these capabilities represent more than technical triumph and staff ingenuity -- they also represent a major shift in attitudes. Identifying and overcoming cultural barriers to change represented another challenge to the project's success.
"We had to show staff how it was going to make their jobs easier and show them the benefits," said Mueller. "So we presented it to them in a kind of entertaining way and a light manner so they didn't feel threatened. We didn't want to make them feel their jobs were at stake. So we gained their trust and educated them."
Project Rollout
In the project's infancy, the goal was to start slowly and aim small. Mueller emphasized that when the intention is to make the kind of investment they were planning, failure is not an option.
"My deputy director had a letter of resignation prepared and said if he failed, it would be his job," she said. "He then said to me, 'This is your last chance, are you going to be committed? If I go down, I'm not going alone.' So my job was on the line, but we went for it. We were committed, and there was no room for failure."
Mueller added that implementing the project became as much about people and ways to handle change management as it was about software.
"We said, 'Let's define our needs and make sure we're all together on it,'" she said. "We had a city consultant come in and tell us that it would cost about $5 million. We weren't sure about that figure, so we sat down with our partners, ESRI and SAP, and came to a solution that only cost $1.8 million."
As Mueller began hard-core work on the project, she kept an open-door policy for her staff to provide feedback. Her only rule: Don't tell me why it's not going to work. Come tell me what it is going to take to make it work. She said this was important because project implementation also required changing people's way of thinking.
"One of the most interesting things we found is that people would say, 'I need this report, and now I'm not going to get it with the new system,'" said Mueller. "We went out and made sure they got the report in the new system. Then it never was touched. Nobody ever used it. People didn't realize that with the new tools, they didn't need many of the old things they had been accustomed to.
"Another thing people said was, 'My system works just fine.' One of my favorite examples of this was the person who handles all the requests for the street trees," Mueller said. "She would say, 'I've got my file cabinet, and I know where everything is.' And she did. She knew her file system so well, she could tell you about any tree along any street. But she was the only one. What happens when she leaves?
"She was probably the most resistant. I think within a year after we got it up and running, she was probably the most expert user of our system among all the users. She wouldn't do without it and absolutely loved it."
Citizen Access and Payback
The project's implementation proved so successful that the top of the division pushed to expand it. Other departments wanted access, and so an intranet was created. Then, city officials wanted to give San Diego citizens access, and so an Internet site was created.
Through the site, citizens can submit a street repair request online (potholes, streetlight, traffic-light repair, graffiti, etc.) using either traditional text entry or by using a GIS viewer to isolate specific geographic areas. Citizens can also go online and directly access the SAP work management system to see the status of their submittals.
The next stage of expansion, Mueller said , is giving supervisors access to the same applications while out in the field. A mobile device is being designed to allow this.
"The big thing we are doing is revisiting," she said. "It has been two to four years. The system is great. It works great. But before we continue to grow, [we] want to go back and look at our processes and tweak them. You can always get another 20 percent efficiency out of the system just by going back and looking at it again, and making your foundation even stronger."
So far the Internet site has not been advertised, and staff wants to ensure it's sufficiently robust to handle the added Internet traffic -- even without advertising, people have found the site. The division's staff began getting 20 to 30 requests per month via the Internet, and within 6 months, still without any advertising, the division saw an increase to 600 to 700 hits a month. Mueller said the division has received a lot of positive feedback from the site.
Undoubtedly, the project's real impact is increased efficiency, and Mueller said that within a year or two of getting the system up and running, the division had already recovered the initial costs.
"Financially speaking, I think the greatest benefit was all the false alarms that were avoided," said Mueller. "There was a huge cost involved in sending equipment and crews to a place in response to call and discovering that the problem didn't exist. The address was wrong or the problem wasn't where people said it was. Now that's all avoided."
Now when someone reports a problem over the phone, staff members pull the information up on their computer while talking to the person. The exact location is identified to avoid false alarms, which Mueller said is a huge savings for the city.
