Opinions about ArcGIS Workforce for City infrastructure management

[RachaelMurtaugh]

We are a smaller community looking to migrate our infrastructure to a GIS-centered management. I'd like to hear people's thoughts and opinions about using Workforce to manage city infrastructure maintenance, asset management, etc.  

[Reinaldo_Cartagena]

ArcGIS Workforce is a good tool for planning and assignment management. This application includes basic capabilities and can be extended through the Python API. It integrates and orchestrates ArcGIS applications such as:

ArcGIS Field Maps
ArcGIS Collector
ArcGIS Explorer
ArcGIS Navigator
ArcGIS Survey123

Work online and offline.

It can help them manage city infrastructure maintenance, asset management, etc. See the following links:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/workforce/projects 
https://doc.arcgis.com/en/workforce/android-phone/help/create-your-first-project.htm 

Reinaldo.

[RachaelMurtaugh]

Thank you so much. It's one thing to see demos, but I liked hearing "real" people's thoughts. 

[JakeMatthys]

We use ArcGIS Workforce in conjunction with Survey123 to perform 80K water distribution network inspections per year.  The work management component consisting of where the employee needs to be, when and for what reason, are all delivered in a map centric app that is easy to use.  We couple Workforce with Survey123 so that our inspectors can answer questions specific to the type of inspection that they are performing.  The loose coupling between Workforce and Survey123 presents pros and cons, depending on your workflow design.

 - Jake

[RachaelMurtaugh]

What would you say are the pros and cons of the loose coupling between Workforce and Survey 123? 

[Reinaldo_Cartagena]

We in Colombia have used Workforce in the planning of work to be carried out by the field crews on the subject of urban and rural cadastral updating throughout Colombia. We use a Text(50) type field "ID_Barrido" from the Feature Class "LC_Terreno" of the LADM-COL model, to join Workforce (WorkOrderID) and Survey (ID_Barrido). This works well online and offline, it also allows work to be paused, canceled, completed, reassigned, etc. I describe some important issues in our user experience:

For us in Colombia, each municipality is a Workforce project and in each project there are several types of assignments, one for each Survey form.

In Colombia, a municipality manages between 10,000 and 100,000 assignments and Workforce management is good (there are more than 1,000 municipalities, now it is included as 100).

We work with operators who have ArcGIS Enterprise and others who have ArcGIS Online. Work well on both portals.

We do the control panels with the web map of the dispatcher and we filter the status of assignments in the panels.

We have worked on the Workforce App for mobile and it works well.

We use the Python API and create an ArcGIS Pro toolbox that through an excel, txt, csv, etc. handle assignments. see the picture:

What could improve ArcGIS Workforce:

I think that directly integrating Workforce with the Survey inbox (user_id), would help
Include dashboards for the dispatcher and worker. would you help
Includes Experience Builder ArcGIS for the web app dispatcher and woerker. Would help

[RachaelMurtaugh]

Thank you. This is very insightful. 

[JakeMatthys]

Pros: loose coupling allows for ad hoc work to occur, for example an inspector can perform an inspection that was not scheduled in Workforce by submitting a Survey123 survey for the work

Cons: loose coupling makes it difficult to prevent duplicate surveys.  An inspector can submit the same survey multiple times (this can be prevented with javascript, but not out of the box).  Also see here (https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-workforce-questions/force-survey-for-assignment-to-be-submitted...)