The problem
A mid sized city of about 90,000 people was running its public works department the same way it had since the nineties. Residents called in potholes, dead streetlights, and downed signs. A dispatcher wrote the address on a carbon copy work order and radioed whichever crew sounded free.
The results were predictable. Two crews sometimes showed up at the same address. Other times nobody showed up for eleven days. The city manager kept getting questions at council meetings about why the road on Fifth Street still looked like a gravel path.
Response time averaged nine days per complaint. The department knew it was bad. They just had no way to see it, because nothing was tracked anywhere you could actually look at.
What they tried before
The city bought a legacy asset management system a few years back. It cost more than a fire truck and required a week of training just to log a work order. The crews quietly went back to paper within a month and the system sat there renewing its license every year.
They also tried a shared spreadsheet during the pandemic years. That worked until two supervisors edited it at the same time and wiped out three days of records.
How FleetOS helped
FleetOS was set up in under two weeks. Every truck got a tablet mount. Work orders now come in as pins on a live map, and dispatch assigns them to the nearest crew instead of the loudest radio voice.
Month 1: Every vehicle visible in real time. Dispatch stopped guessing. Month 2: Citizens started getting automatic status texts when their report was assigned and completed. Month 3: The city ran preventive routes. Instead of waiting for complaints, trucks patrolled zones on schedules that covered every ward twice a week. Month 4: Response time dropped below five days and stayed there.
The results after 4 months
- Average response time fell from 9 days to 4.3
- Duplicate visits eliminated, saving roughly 60 crew hours a month
- Complaint volume dropped 30% once preventive patrols started
- Council meetings got shorter because the data answered the questions
- Crews like knowing their whole zone is handled before lunch
What didn't work
Not everything went smoothly. The first attempt at citizen status texts used technical language that confused people. "Ticket 4021 has been routed to Sector 7" generated more phone calls than no message at all. They rewrote everything in plain sentences and confusion disappeared.
What they'd do differently
"We spent years assuming modern software was only for big cities. Nobody ever told us a small department could set something like up in two weeks."
Next steps
They want to connect snow plow routes next winter so residents can see which streets have been treated. Public works says that request alone comes in hundreds of times per storm.