Animal Services Routing

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

In today’s economy, every department in Miami-Dade County challenged to improve services, making work flows more green and efficient, while also cutting costs. The Animal Services Department is charged with responding to over 37,000 citizen requests and complaints per year, which require field visits by officers, investigators, or technicians. The internal routing of requests has been a manual process whereby citizen requests were gathered, prioritized and filtered through dispatchers, and forwarded to the appropriate field personnel for manual routing and response. The Animal Services Department (ETSD) collaborated to restructure the service request workflow and create the Animal Services Routing System. The program consisted of the following actions: 1) Implementation of ArcLogistics, cloud-based automated routing software. ArcLogistics allowed for ASD to create a customized routing solution. Through this solution, they were able to assign requests by specialties, schedule based upon priorities and service times, as well as handle shifts, overtime, and days off; 2) Development of an automated interface between the County’s service request system and ArcLogistics, thus eliminating the time-consuming and error-prone manual process. 3) Restructure of the workflow to gain efficiencies by eliminating the spatially oriented constraints of pre-defined work zones and by starting the inspectors’ workdays from dispersed locations throughout the County. The implementation of the Routing System has improved services to Miami-Dade County citizens. Reductions have occurred on processing time of service requests, operating costs, and carbon monoxide emissions. All County residents are recipients of the program’s benefits.