Co-Lab CASE STUDY: Co-Lab

In 2023, Co-Lab was finding it challenging to instantly report the status of roading contracts to councils. The data was there but it was buried deep within a series of spreadsheets that had to be mined.

Having worked with Company-X on the Transport Insights initiative, Co-Lab turned to Company-X to transform its spreadsheets into a fully functional, visually intuitive contract tracking dashboard.

The dashboard reports on:

• programmed work
• work in progress, and
• completed work.

The contract tracking dashboard can also be used to ease the reconciliation of Co-Lab’s contract progress data with councils and suppliers.

Co-Lab was established was to act as think tank for people, partner councils, and industry to collaborate, prioritize, and design operations and engagement improvement opportunities within the communities. Co-lab - previously known as Waikato Local Authority Shared Services - is a collaboration of ten city, district, and regional councils in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato regions.

Co-Lab was using traditional spreadsheets to track and report the progress of transport data collection contracts across ten member councils. Results were collated and emailed to councils on request. This traditional approach was taking significant administrative time for Co-Lab staff to review, update, reconcile, and report progress across the portfolio of projects to councils.

Company-X developed a contract tracking dashboard for Co-Lab. The Contract tracker reports progress across multiple contracts, enabling councils to reconcile their reported results with participating councils and suppliers. Over 12 weeks Company-X stationed a business analyst one day a week within the Co-Lab office to understand the experiences, pain points, vision, and opportunities through a first-hand account. Company-X quickly spun up a minimum viable product within those weeks.

As of February 2024, Co-Lab has launched its live data into the system with the intention of rolling out the product to users in ten city, district, and regional councils in the near future.

The process of developing the dashboard was excellent. The end product is a professional looking dashboard which we can use to communicate to our council customers the status of contracts that we run on behalf of our councils.

Cameron Senior
Asset Information Team Lead
Co-Lab

Contract Tracker is going to save Co-Lab one day per week.

Tony Benetti
Manager
Road Asset Technical Accord