The Challenge
Herefordshire Council’s residents report potholes using a form on the Council website, but not all roads or road segments are the responsibility of the Council – some are maintained by third parties. The Council were receiving many reports of potholes which were on roads of which they were not responsible. This was consuming the time and resource of administrative staff, and also negatively impacting the satisfaction of those reporting potholes.
The Council’s Local Street Gazetteer contains the necessary road maintenance data, however this is stored in Aligned Assets Symphony Gazetteer, which is not compatible with the Council’s online report submission system.
The Solution
The Council needed a way to identify who was responsible for maintaining a road segment before the reporter submitted the form, so that they would be redirected to the correct and appropriate organisation (if that was not the Council).
- Extract and Validate: LSG Data is pulled from the Symphony Gazetteer and validated.
- Transform: The data is transformed into a format that can be used by their online system.
- Load: Validated data is loaded into the database running the website.
When the reporter inputs the pothole location, the website can now establish whether the road segment is managed by the Council. If not, the customer is redirected to the applicable organisation before they finish reporting. This has improved user satisfaction, and has prevented the Council receiving reports for roads outside of their control, saving time and resource.