Traffic Management Act Compliance for Street Works Noticing

Traffic Management Act 2004 (TMA) had substantially amended NRSWA (New Road and Street Works Act) for undertaking street works in the public highways in England and Wales

Major changes to the rules governing the notices to councils by utilities prior to, during and after working on their underground assets in the public highway eg: installation of new pipelines, maintaining existing assets in footpath or carriageway

Like all utilities with assets in public highway, our client had to comply with major changes introduced by the new regulatory regime

Client had initiated the project quite late compared to the industry peers i.e. only 9 months prior to the regulations go-liv, in comparison to lot of other utilities who started project at least 2 years before, resulting in less time for solution delivery

Conducted strategy study to undertake as-is process mapping, assess old and new regulatory regime and their impact on client, financial risk, define requirements and roadmap for solution delivery phase

Analysed historical data to get a view of non-compliance at team level; Automated MI reports for driving improvement, as an interim solution

Developed to-be process maps and detailed requirements; Produce UML diagrams to support SAP consultants in producing solution blueprint; Support developers to produce prototypes and validate with client

Clarified business queries to deliver SAP ERP centric solution, involving CRM, Noticing, Field force solution, GIS & integration changes

Prepared training material; Comms with internal/external stakeholders

Provided business support to go live with 44 councils in a phased manner

One of the first utilities to go-live on time, while most claimed that they would be ready but couldn’t on the government proposed go-live date

Improved noticing compliance from 65% to consistently over 98% through interim solution by the time of go-live; then on to over 99% after main solution live

Risk of newly introduced penalties reduced: £28m risk at project start Vs. <£1,000 actual penalties in first year

No increase in FTEs for client, while industry on an average has increased FTEs by 20% to manage the new processes and additional data requirements for noticing

Collaborative & partnership focused relationship built with Councils

Business driving the project (rather than IT), communications and wider collaboration sessions were seen as best practices by the client’s executive team