New regulations, legacy technology: A state transportation agency's journey
A state transportation agency is responsible for the inventory, oversight, and data management of 36,000+ bridges across its coverage area. The agency oversees all bridge inspections, analyzing and reporting on the data to federal agencies. To collect and analyze data from these inspections, the agency was leveraging two different applications. One application dealt with inventory data, and the other handled inspection data, which was then fed into the inventory database.
In addition to these applications being legacy technology, the two separate systems meant that any bug fixes, enhancements, or implementation of regulatory changes needed to be coded in both applications, drastically increasing development time and maintenance effort. The agency knew this was not an optimal use of the IT team’s time.
In late 2019, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced an overhaul of its reporting standards—the first major change to these standards since 1996. The new mandate increases the volume of information collected during bridge inspections, also increasing the number of annual records submitted and the amount of data the applications must handle. Since the state agency was operating with two separate legacy applications, this meant both would need to undergo significant changes and updates to meet the new requirements.
Once the FHWA mandate was released, the agency decided to completely modernize its bridge management system into a single application that could perform both inventory and inspection functions in compliance with the new Specifications for the National Bridge Inventory (SNBI) reporting requirements. This would allow for a more streamlined experience with newer technologies, lowering the amount of time required for development, bug fixes, enhancements, and more.
Modernizing and streamlining bridge management
The agency, having successfully partnered with CAI on previous modernization projects, selected a CAI team to work closely with the Bridge Inspection Unit on modernizing their bridge management applications. They started with an SNBI-compliant inspections module to help guide the project and determine an order of priority.
The team worked to implement all federally mandated requirements, which necessitated a full redesign of the application for entering inspection data. After understanding the requirements and developing the application, the team deployed it as a cloud-hosted Progressive Web App. This enables both online and offline usage of the application without requiring installation or support for local machines, and it allows any modern web-enabled device (laptop, iPad, mobile phone) to be used by the bridge inspectors. This application makes reporting and data management much easier for all involved and far more accessible.
The inspection data application was deployed to production while the team continued working on the overall modernization project, allowing value to be delivered to the client faster. The team continues to work alongside the agency for the next phases of modernizing the inventory portion of the system to ensure all requirements are met within a single, cloud-hosted application.
Proven results ahead of schedule
A modern Progressive Web App allows bridge inspectors to enter inspection information from any web-enabled device, either offline or online. This was rolled out to over 1,000 bridge inspectors across the state and is now being used as part of the agency’s over 19,000 annual inspections per year. The single, cloud-hosted application saves time and resources both for bridge inspectors and the IT teams tasked with managing the day-to-day application work.
Because of the close collaboration with the agency and timely deployment, the CAI team was able to complete their upgrades 3 years prior to the federally mandated deadline, setting the agency up for continued optimization and success amidst additional modernization efforts.
At CAI, our comprehensive approach to service delivery allows us to build and organize the right teams for any transformation initiative. If you’re interested in learning more about modernizing your applications for the future, contact us.
