Open Access to EToN

Transferring responsibility for EToN (Electronic Transfer of Notifications) to roadworks agents.

All local authorities in the UK are responsible for coordinating work on their roads. They notify all road closure and roadwork data to a central national database at roadworks.org. EToN 6.0 is a common, comprehensive standard across all notifying bodies. It is however, onerous to administer. It requires a lot of information. It’s no exaggeration to say that councils spend in excess of £10Mn a year on people costs to populate EToN.  This is excluding any annual licensing, hardware and subscription costs.

Eliminate the costs of EToN.

There are a number of integrated asset management systems that allow the local authority to do this: look at the popular CONFIRM system from Pitney Bowes, Mayrise, Symology and others. However, these offering don’t come cheap. Hard pressed local authority budgets do not permit their entire asset management systems to be upgraded, especially as these are complex animals, of varying age, with unknown or undocumented sub-systems.

Here is where SpringboardIT comes in. Whilst it would be nice to have an integrated, fully internally consistent management systems for your road network, reality is not like that.

An efficient, cost-effective EToN compliant retrofit.

The thinking behind EToN is that there is a single API definition for all submissions – saving costs all round. This avoids, say, BT having to submit data to the relevant local authorities (LAs) in different formats.

Recently, SpringboardIT developed a system for a major subcontractor. Replacing a predominantly manual system of logging road notifications, we extracted relevant data from their roads database. We calculated necessary fields and rules included within the EToN standard, finally we prepare a submission file for checking before it is added to Devon County Council’s EToN submission.
Saving – about one person, payback, about 1 year.

An external portal for roadworks submissions

Taking this a step further, a large number of applications for road possession are submitted with manual documentation, and processed by Local Authority staff. SpringboardIT have enabled a large and very integrated highways contractor to take over this task from the local authority. The system allows them to check physical conflicts (see our blog on Roadworks Coordination) validates the data entered against category of work, reporting timescales and the requirements of the standard.

Moving this process from LA to user saves cost, gives the user more control and eliminates process duplication. Don’t wait for a big bang software project. Do it now!