November 25, 2013 -- The UK’s Lancashire County Council is improving its road network asset management with a new web-based managed service from Yotta. The Horizons map-based  Visualised Asset Management System enables the council to make cost-effective treatment decisions using the best highways engineering principles.  Horizons replaces Lancashire's old Pavement Management System to provide a single solution for highway scheme prioritisation.

With Yotta providing consultancy and support, and Horizons giving a clear view of Lancashire's 7000 km road network, the council can now proactively manage its assets and reduce whole life costs. This is a complex task as Lancashire has a wide range of road types being a part rural and part urban county, where treatments must be chosen according to type of road and its location.

"We have a lot of challenges in managing our road network with 2600 km of classified and 4400 km of unclassified roads to maintain. We want to get the best out of our network using the budgets we have to work with and Horizons is very useful in helping us achieve our goals. One of the many things we like about Horizons is the ability to generate maintenance scheme lists that tell us exactly what needs addressing and what it will cost," says Rebecca Makinson, highways database manager for Lancashire County Council.

"This allows us to take a proactive approach to highway maintenance and helps us to save money on whole life costs of the asset. For example, if we surface dress a carriageway before it begins to deteriorate we can maximise the life of the road, stopping further deterioration in its tracks."

"The mapping is also useful as it allows us to zoom in and out on the asset and it is very user friendly. It didn't take long to learn how to use it - in fact, if you can use Google Maps, then you can use Horizon's mapping with very little training," continued Rebecca Makinson.

Lancashire also particularly liked the ability to link Horizons to its video camera footage and downward facing images of the carriageway to verify scanner data without having to leave the office. Rebecca Makinson added, "The video link saves a lot of time - we can simply verify the scanner data over the system rather than have to travel to site and, with Horizon's graphing capability, we can verify what is causing the road condition indicators to be high.

"The information we need is available instantly. There is no need to run queries and reports and the information that guides our treatment decisions is accurate.  Having good information at our fingertips ensures we can get maximum value from the network at the lowest cost."

CONTACTS:
Beth Rothwell,
Email Contact,
+44 (0)1926 319 613,
www.yotta.co.uk