Any Public Works Crews Using Workforce for Maintenance/Service Entry?

Question

Just wanted to take the temperature of Workforce users in any Public Works use case.

Anybody find it useful for crews to enter in service/maintenance/inspection data?

Anybody run up against the inherent drawback of Workforce, that you can only close out one task at a time.  You can't select multiple features and close our their tasks in bulk/batch?

oakmn · Answer

Thanks Craig.

It doesn't really help a use case for Public Works.  They exercise hundreds of gate valves a day, flush hundreds of hydrants in a day, sweep 500 street segments a day, snow plow thousands of street segments in a day, fill thousands of potholes a day, paint/stripe 500 street segments a day, jet a hundred sanitary sewers or storm sewers in a day.  Crews don't have their phones out when they are in the field doing their work.  When they come back into the office at the end of the day, that is when they enter in what they have completed.  So swiping hundreds to a thousand tasks/features seems rather ridiculous.  Also, Workforce only allows less than about 100 tasks/features to be allowed in an assignment....so in my street sweeping examples above, I would have to create five separate assignments at 100 features per assignment, to cover the same job in a day...

My take-away just seems to be that Workforce isn't designed for, or the workflows of City or County Public Works crews wasn't the use case when creating Workforce.  The limitations are so great, it becomes worthless for us to use as a tool.  But, ESRI doesn't have a tool to batch close assignments, or batch create related records/maintenance records for field crews.  So really, no ESRI software or solution has Public Works crews / asset management workflows as a use case....  Which, I guess is why most to all cities, counties, state agencies, etc., look outside of ESRI to find an asset management solution.  Seems strange because almost every city, county and state agency has/uses ESRI, but when it comes to asset management, ESRI doesn't have a solution that functions for field crews, which the two are so inextricably tied.  Seems like a large hole in ESRI's portfolio.

cgillgrass · Answer

@oakmn while we don't support the ability to select assignments in the To Do list to bulk complete, Workforce does support the ability to swipe the Assignment to quickly change its status, similar to how Mail apps work.

For example, if you swipe to the right, you'll see the option to Finish the assignment.

Does this help with your use case?

Craig