Preparing for Legislative Changes: Street Manager 2020
The new Street Manager legislation is due to launch in July 2020 and has raised many questions as to exactly what the impact for road works companies will be. In this blog post we explore why the current legislation needs to be updated, the primary differences between EToN6 and Street manager, and what you need to do to prepare for the new requirements.
Why is new legislation required?
A recent Government report revealed that there are 2.5 million roadworks per year at a cost of £4bn. This includes street works carried out by utility companies to install, repair, and maintain vital services and works carried out by the local highways authorities (LHAs) to maintain roads. This has led to the Government setting out a new strategy designed to modernise street works planning and management. It is hoped that by empowering local authorities, utility companies, and contractors with digital solutions street works will be carried out more efficiently thus minimising the impact on congestion.
Analysis by the Department for Transport (Dft) has concluded that the current solution, Electronic Transfer of Notification (EToN), lacks standardisation, cohesion, flexibility, and transparency. Modern technology has the power to significantly improve street works planning and management through digital transformation.
What is the new Street Manager legislation?
Street Manager is a paid-for unified digital system for booking and carrying out local road and street works under a new national permit scheme system. It applies to all local authorities and utility companies in England and will be mandatory on 1 July 2020.
Street Manager has been designed to eliminate the current inefficiency of road and street works caused by the use of multiple disparate systems containing unreliable data. This lack of centralisation causes limited visibility of planned works resulting in a lack of collaboration between utility companies and local authorities, and significant administrative and other overheads. The Street Manager platform is a single solution to be used by all the benefits of which will be: Visibility across the entire street network, collaboration, adaptation to change, and reduction of overheads.
How will Street Manager impact you?
In order to comply with Street Manager contractors will have to submit start and stop notices within two hours, and comply with new restrictions resulting from changes to S58 restrictions and definitions of major works.
Preparing for Street Manager
If you do not already have an automated permitting system it is highly recommended that you do so in order to proactively manage and deliver works and optimise workforces. Causeway’s Integrated Maintenance Management (IMM) is an end-to-end solution that integrates with the Street Manager platform removing the need to re-key data thus eliminating the risk of error and saving time.
Job allocation and scheduling
Causeway’s IMM automatically imports jobs and associated requirements (e.g. workforce skills and restrictions). Using IMM, back office staff are able to allocate and schedule jobs in a single dashboard with total visibility into all upcoming and in-progress jobs.
Ensuring compliance
The solution also ensures you are compliant to all planning constraints and requirements of Street Manager by automatically detecting and warning users when specific permits are required on a job-by-job basis. Causeway’s IMM sends applications for permits to Street Manager for approval and issue and users are alerted, in real-time if there are any discrepancies between the application and the requirements under Street Manager.
Job management
Causeway’s IMM enables back office staff to perform key functions of job management, workforce management, vehicle tracking, and route planning.
A mobile app used by workforces automatically sends real-time progress and activity status information to the same dashboard that is used for scheduling and notifies workforce managers if there is a risk of project overrun and any permit updates that are required. This real-time synchronisation from the mobile app to the back office system allows schedulers to adapt quickly to any changes and divert or deploy additional workforces if required.
Risk assessment
Workforces can take and mark up photos in the mobile app onsite which are automatically sent to the back office system. By combining this information with interactive mapping including satellite, terrain and street views from Google Maps users of Causeway’s IMM can carry out risk assessments without the need to be on-site.
Financial management
Street Manager requires Utilities contractors to pay for permits which can increase the cost of completing jobs. Causeway’s IMM and Project Accounting creates a bi-directional synchronisation of job management and finance data.
By centralising mobile working, sub-contracting, certification, and finance data in a single interface the Causeway solutions provide total visibility into real-time progress and completion details. This ensures accurate cost value recognition and performance reporting leading to improved efficiency and commercial performance.
View Causeway’s latest webinar on ‘How to Prepare for Street Manager’ now.
To find out more about how Causeway’s IMM and Project Accounting can help you prepare for and comply with Street Manager.
