CAI application development and maintenance services for mission-critical systems
Challenge
A state transportation agency coordinates the planning and development of the state’s transportation system and assures the compatibility of all components, including multimodal transportation systems, roadways, air, rail, sea, spaceports, bus transit, and bicycle and pedestrian systems. The agency manages nearly 123,000 miles of public road, 31 urban and 21 rural transit systems, 20 commercial airports, and almost 3,000 miles of railroad.
Like most large state transportation agencies, this agency relies on hundreds of contracts worth billions of dollars for the work it oversees in constructing, expanding, and maintaining transportation infrastructure across the state. Evaluating the quality of professional services, skills, and expertise of external contractors in construction and engineering at this scale is an enormous task. Agency decision-makers wanted an intuitive and flexible web-based application that would help manage and streamline the process.
Solution
After two application development firms failed at the task, the agency asked CAI to help. We worked with the stakeholders at the agency to document requirements for data capture and user experience – and did so quickly to make up for prior false starts. The underlying data for each evaluation of a construction contract required 23 tables and 797 columns and cumbersome interaction with a mainframe system designed and implemented in the 1980s. This had prevented agency staff from accessing historical information about vendor performance and leveraging it in their professional evaluations and in awarding future contracts.
CAI built the Consultant Evaluation (CE) application to allow employees quick access to staff evaluations so they can more effectively monitor vendor performance and award new contracts.
Results
The agency’s new CE app leverages data from all necessary sources so it can more fully and easily evaluate contract deliverables, contractor performance, and related construction and engineering skills. Not only does the CE system facilitate contracting decisions that are based more soundly on up-to-date data, but it also expedites evaluations by 33 percent, saving more than 18,000 hours a year in data entry and review. And it saves nearly $39,000, enabling the agency to spend tax dollars more efficiently.
