AccordMP is a joint venture between public services supplier Accord and Mouchel Parkman (MP), which provides management, commercial and engineering services. It was set up about a year ago to manage and maintain road networks for local authorities and the Highways Agency.

The organisation’s two main contracts concern looking after Area One A- roads in Devon and Cornwall, and the major trunk roads in south London for Transport for London.

In autumn last year, AccordMP installed a GPS-based vehicle management and telematics system from APD Communications in its network control centre to enable personnel to route field staff to where they were most needed in real time.

Gareth Griffiths, senior IT business partner for highways at MP, says that because the Area One network is remote with long distances involved, the organisation needed to be smart about how it tasked people.

‘We don’t need to wait until staff come back to the depot to pick up a new job because we know where they are and can move them about more effectively,’ he says. ‘It makes the process of maintaining roads faster and more efficient.’

The same theory applies to London, where congestion is a problem, and technology becomes increasingly important.

‘There’s pressure from clients to do things more cheaply and pressure from the travelling public to do things quickly,’ he says. ‘So it’s all about minimising the impact to the public, improving journey times and making the roads safer.’

The next step will be to hook up the vehicle tracking system to the organisation’s highways management applications to provide field staff with their work orders and allow them to fill in the forms in real-time when the job is complete. This will mean that personnel will not have to spend an hour at t he end of each day filling in paperwork.

Another longer-term goal is to develop real-time transport network management applications, based on GPS and decision support tools. The systems would be similar in nature to existing systems management packages that provide a real-time view of what is happening across the network, to enable staff to make informed decisions.

‘It’s about trying to pull together information from a lot of different sources in such a way as to spot problems before they happen,’ says Griffiths.

‘I don’t think there’s anything like that available on the market at the moment, but it is an area that we’ll look because, increasingly, we need to be much smarter at managing the network.’