Unique software system optimises gully maintenance operations

Gullies play a vital role in flood prevention, therefore an efficient and effective maintenance program is essential to keep the whole system running smoothly. Those responsible for local council gully maintenance and auditing have a huge task on their hands to ensure that the thousands of gullies in their area are recorded, inspected, cleaned and monitored on a regular basis.

Morecambe based company, In Touch Ltd, has developed a simple and easy to use gully maintenance system which helps to manage the entire process whilst providing significant operational cost savings.

As part of the In Touch system, gully maintenance vehicles are fitted with a tracking device which plots the location of every gully as well as allowing management to see exactly where the entire fleet is at any given time. A specially designed control unit is also installed on the exterior of each vehicle so that once a gully has been inspected, all the operative has to do is press a button to record the status of the gully, whether it be clean and running, blocked, jammed or broken. This virtually eliminates the need for any paperwork at all, thus reducing valuable time spent on administration duties.

Information on the status and condition of each gully is then instantly fed back to the central web based system. Management are able to monitor, record and analyse all gully cleaning activities, pull off a variety of reports and export data in multiple formats to existing software systems. The unique features of the In Touch system are particularly useful when planning preventative treatment of flooding hotspots. Audit trails are simple and easy to perform with no need to search through huge amounts of paperwork to gather information.

The simplicity and functionality of the system means that record keeping is made effortless and accurate, routes can be planned efficiently and patterns of work can be scheduled intelligently to make optimum use of resources. This also builds a working database that lets management view all assets and gullies in real time and always have a clear picture of what’s happening on the ground.

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12 January 2010