South Gloucestershire

Exactrak and Ordnance Survey

Highways Drainage Services

South Gloucestershire

The value of using an effective tracking and monitoring system on gritters has been well documented but more and more local authorities are seeing the benefit of fitting other municipal vehicles, including gully emptiers, with a GPS system such as Exactrak.

South Gloucestershire Council is one local authority that has recently installed Exactrak on one of its gully emptiers. As Alison Richards, Street Cleansing Manager at the Council explains, "Having Exactrak as part of our gully emptying system means it is much easier to ensure all aspects of the job are undertaken properly. The box that sits inside the gully emptier as part of Exactrak is very straightforward to use and has just four buttons - 'Cleanse', 'Fault/Enter', 'Select'and 'Jetting'. This makes it extremely easy for the operating crew as they only have to press a button to record their activities. Previously, they needed to complete paper records - this could be time consuming and was also not always the most reliable method of monitoring the fact that work had been carried out."

Alison Richards also feels that the 'live' status of Exactrak is a particularly useful aspect of the system. "If a flood suddenly occurs we are able to quickly locate the gully emptier, send it to the road in question and record the vehicle's arrival time and activity once there."

South Gloucestershire Council finds that the system helps them maintain the planned schedule of works and ensure overall efficiency, and information from Exactrak has also been used to iron out specific service level questions. Explaining further, Alison says "There is a particular road in the district with which we often have flooding issues and the highways team set up a meeting with local residents who had become concerned about the problem. Using the information provided by Exactrak we were able to demonstrate to residents exactly when and how often the gullies had been cleaned and this was a great help in resolving the matter. Overall, we've been really pleased with how Exactrak is working and we are now extending it to other vehicles including another gully emptier, three roadsweepers and three grass mowers."

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Exactrak and Ordnance Survey

Please download the attached pdf to read about why Exactrak chose Ordnance Survey as their mapping solutions partner.


OS Case Study


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Highways Drainage Services

Rob Dodge is the Operations Manager at Highways Drainage Services, a specialist drainage contractor that works with many local authorities providing gully emptying and drains cleaning services. Rob has trailed Exactrak on gully emptiers with several of the company's local authority clients and has found that more and more local authorities require contractors to be able to provide some kind of reporting system.

Explaining further, Rob said,"It is now very much expected that we can offer a tracking system on gully emptiers. Local authorities need to be able to monitor operations and check any faults and Exactrak lets them see what was cleaned, what wasn't and why and the locations of the gully emptier's. Also, a key facet of Exactrak is that it is live which makes a huge difference. I've worked with systems previously where the reports weren't available until several days after the event but these days that's not really acceptable."

Ease of use is also an important consideration according to Rob, "These systems really need to be very simple so that the operator can get on with their job without worrying about operating the reporting system. The box that sits inside the gully emptier as part of Exactrak is very straightforward with just three buttons to press - 'Cleanse', 'Fault/Enter', and 'Select'. Some systems are pretty complicated with keyboard entry and multiple menus."

In Rob's experience, one of the key reasons his local authority clients are using the system is to ensure they have accurate data in case of insurance claims. He explains, "If a car has an accident, depending on the circumstances, the local authority often has to be able to prove that a gully was cleaned at a particular time, thereby ensuring they're not hit with large insurance claims."

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