Streamlining Work Planning for County Maintenance Workforces

Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) County Maintenance Staff face complex challenges in coordinating, scheduling, and documenting work conducted by crews. While work assignments ultimately must be formally documented, the steps taken to finalize that documentation vary greatly from garage to garage, are full of redundancies, and open to potential missteps. Methods currently utilized by County Garage personnel to track activities span from emails, post-it-notes, dry erase boards, calendars, spreadsheets, and notes on paper. County Garage Managers develop work plans on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly and annual basis. Activities from these plans are assigned as tasks to each crew based on specific days/weeks to accomplish projects in a timely manner. However, maintenance forces are often redirected from scheduled work to address roadway emergencies such as accidents, vehicle fires, roadway flooding, fallen trees, lost tractor-trailer loads, slips, calls from local law enforcement and/or emergency responders for maintenance of traffic or other assistance, calls from the public to report issues, and so forth. When these emergencies arise, the work originally scheduled to take place that day does not occur, and it must be rescheduled to another day. Given the ad-hoc tracking of assignments, it is difficult to ensure tasks are not lost, all work that needs to be rescheduled is addressed appropriately, and formalized documentation of the activities that took place occurs. The goal of this research is to streamline maintenance work planning processes for county garage staff.

• Record URL:
  https://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Planning/SPR/Research/reportsandplans/Lists/Final%20Reports%20All/AllItems.aspx#InplviewHash7d4d0273-6fc5-48a5-ad17-9cc3a7e83da0=SortField%3DList_x0020_Categori-SortDir%3DAsc-FilterField1%3DResearch%255Fx0020%255FOrganization-FilterValue1%3DCultivate%2520Geospatial%2520Solutions%252C%2520LLC

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $327498
• Contract Numbers:

  41215

  120521

  136813

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Ohio Department of Transportation

  Research Program
  1980 West Broad Street
  Columbus, OH  United States  43223
• Project Managers:

  Martindale, Jill

• Performing Organizations:

  Cultivate Geospatial Solutions, LLC

  3500 Depauw Blvd.
  Suite 10807
  Indianapolis, Indiana  United States  46268
• Principal Investigators:

  Puente, John

• Start Date: 20241021
• Expected Completion Date: 20241021
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Contingency planning; Emergencies; Highway maintenance; Incident management; Maintenance management; Scheduling
• Identifier Terms: Ohio Department of Transportation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01930013
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Ohio Department of Transportation
• Contract Numbers: 41215, 120521, 136813
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Sep 11 2024 2:42PM