Hamilton firm has everything all mapped out.
The road to success for a group of national infrastructure professionals led to the door of Company-X.
The Hamilton software developer was asked by the Road Efficiency Group to create a tool that could analyse and report on the nation’s roading data.
Roading authorities needed Company-X to build a tool that would help them prioritize investment on maintenance and renewals.
The group, a collaboration between the New Zealand Transport Agency, Local Government New Zealand and the Road Controlling Authorities Forum, had already developed a framework to assist road authorities to understand their roads as part of an integrated transport network when it turned to Company-X for help.
“The framework, the One Network Road Classification, classifies roads into a nationally consistent hierarchy,” Road Efficiency Group member Dawn Inglis.
The framework included a very specific set of performance measures.
“Across New Zealand, all road controlling authorities were going to have to derive data from their asset management systems to be able to report on these performance measures. A tool was needed to enable this data analysis and reporting.”
Inglis said the group had turned to the Wintec House based company for help because a member had worked with director Jeremy Hughes before and knew what his capabilities were.
“Company-X understood that we were not experienced in the area of software development and guided us to accepting that an agile approach for the development work was the right way to go,” Inglis said.
“For we roading engineers this was quite different to how we operate in other areas of our business with tight specifications and planning. However, the agile approach has proven to be exactly the right approach,” she said.
“Jeremy took the time to understand the requirements, understand the opportunity, and to develop a set of user requirements which we could agree on as the principles for developing the proof of concept.”
The members of the Road Efficiency Group embraced the proof of concept in mid-2015, and Hughes and Company-X had it fully functional by the end of the year.
“Company-X were really helpful in responding to the need for support to users once the tool was live and the support team have proven invaluable in assisting users,” Inglis said.
“The tool itself is drawing praise from users as being simple to view, to use, and understand. It is now evolving (in an agile way) to become the go-to reporting tool for roading managers wanting to understand how the outcomes on their network are ‘measuring up’ against the set threshold levels.”
Inglis said Company-X’s development of the One Network Road Classification Performance Measures Reporting Tool had received significant favourable feedback from the roading industry. This was due to Company-X’s commitment to understanding the roading industry, Inglis said, based on a comprehensive review of user’s needs.
“Company-X’s work has been very much appreciated by those directly involved in the project, but also by the roading industry who are now using the tool and gaining greater insight into the outcomes being achieved on New Zealand’s roading network.”