GPS Enables Visibility, Promotes Accountability

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

Salt Lake City has improved inspection dispatching and tracking using GPS data.

Salt Lake City’s Building Services and Civil Enforcement Divisions employ more than two dozen inspectors who collectively make hundreds of stops per day at properties around the city. While the inspectors use laptops to manage their inspection data, their managers had no reliable way of locating inspectors during the day to make new assignments or adjust inspection schedules.

When a supervisor needed to find an inspector, they would have to call the inspector’s mobile phone and leave a voice mail. Because of the high number of inspections conducted, there could be a 20-to-30-minute lag time before that message was returned. That made it difficult to alert inspectors when they needed to respond to new requests or emergencies.