VolkerHighways has begun implementing Causeway Maintenance Management to support its growth in the UK highways maintenance sector. In this article the two companies share insights from the rollout.
It says that, in today’s digital-first world, it’s crucial for businesses to adopt solutions to remain competitive and drive growth, and that this is especially true in the infrastructure sector, where digitalisation can help companies streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.
As a multidisciplinary contractor that delivers innovative engineering solutions across the civil engineering and construction sectors, VolkerHighways offers a range of services, including highway maintenance, streetlighting, surfacing, traffic management, telecoms, and smart technology. Despite already working with local authorities on highways maintenance projects, the company is keen to keep securing more significant national contracts that increasingly require sophisticated digital solutions.
This will become more important as National Highways progresses its Digital Roads 2025 vision, which aims to encourage the use of digital technologies to improve safety, efficiency and customer experience on their network.
A key aspect of this vision is the use of data sharing to improve decision-making, performance monitoring, asset management, and customer service. The direction of travel this is setting is likely to feed down to all road networks in the UK, especially as Highways England looks towards better coordination and collaboration between national highways and local authorities.
To support its growth in the UK highways maintenance sector, VolkerHighways has begun implementing Causeway Maintenance Management – an integrated cloud-based platform that delivers digitalisation of the mobile workforce and all operational processes. The company has been using the platform across the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and has already seen significant results.
Since implementation in late 2022, more than 400 work order highway defects were instructed using the interface within the first three weeks, and 243 defects were processed. Additionally, 620 photographs have already been taken, and 489 mobile forms completed, increasing efficiency and ensuring compliance.
VolkerHighways is using this example as a template for further implementation, in 2023 and the solution will go live in West Berkshire, Wokingham, Luton, Medway, Bath and North East Somerset, as well as for various lighting contracts including Oxfordshire County Council lighting maintenance contract.
By choosing Causeway Maintenance Management, VolkerHighways has a committed technology partner that will adapt to industry changes. The Government and local authorities have confidence in companies bidding with established industry-wide solutions, whereas bespoke or in-house solutions provide less assurance.
VolkerHighways consulted with Causeway Technologies after realising the need for a comprehensive solution. Causeway works with the most prominent players in highways maintenance and showed them similar Causeway Maintenance Management deployments with other businesses. Next came broad business cases to show how the solution worked, followed by detailed answers to specific commercial cases. Once the commercial team was happy, workshops were held with the finance and digital business transformation departments.
Causeway Maintenance Management meets four primary challenges that VolkerHighways faces. The platform integrates with multiple local authorities, each with its own asset management system, provides commercial analysis, supports operational management, and integrates into ERP and finance systems, handling operational and commercial management in high-risk maintenance jobs.
With Causeway Maintenance Management, VolkerHighways has complete control over operations in the highways maintenance sector. The system joins up all the key functions, from asset management, works management, job scheduling and mobile working through to cost management, variations, and invoicing, to offer a connected solution for transforming productivity and reducing contract cost and risk.
In conclusion, digitalisation is becoming increasingly important in the infrastructure sector, particularly in the highways maintenance sector. VolkerHighways’ implementation of Causeway Maintenance Management is an excellent example of how digital solutions can support growth, streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.
As the Government continues to find efficiencies through mandated digitalisation, companies that adopt digital solutions will remain competitive and be better equipped to win significant contracts that require sophisticated digital solutions.
(Picture – VolkerHighways)
