■ NOVEMBER 2022
News and Insights from the National e-Ticketing Task Force
Indiana’s
e-Ticketing
Success Story
Materials delivery was always one of the biggest sources of paperwork for Indiana DOT.
“We have rooms full of this stuff,” said Joe Novak, INDOT state construction engineer. “We have to store those in a retrievable manner for 10 years to meet our state record retention requirements.”
With paper tickets, INDOT inspectors can face the end-of-shift each day with 50 to 100 tickets to manually add up and enter into the INDOT system. They often must hunt for paper tickets that are inevitably misplaced on busy road construction sites.
But over the last few years, the department has found a way to tame the beast; INDOT has been introducing materials e-Ticketing, the digital exchange, tracking and archiving of information.
Introducing e-Ticketing
INDOT’s implementation of the e-Ticketing system has been an evolving and carefully-considered process. The department began monitoring the technology in 2018. In the spring of 2020, when Covid hit, it began allowing any supplier to submit e-tickets via email. This reduced person-to-person contact, an important consideration early in the pandemic. To ensure the e-Ticketing system was accurate, INDOT kept logs of all trucks entering these sites. The pilot programs continued through the 2021 construction season.
New Research Quantifies the Benefits of E-Ticketing
State transportation departments are increasingly struggling to fill key vacancies. However, emerging technologies can reduce burdensome paperwork and free up existing employees to fulfill key functions.
That’s according to new research on the benefits of e-Ticketing from Dr. Karthik Subramanya and a team at the University of Texas Arlington. The paper was presented at the ASCE Proceedings of Transportation Consortium of South-Central States in July.
Quick Bytes
Exciting things are happening! Discover new participants who have joined the Task Force, follow media coverage of initiative innovators, mark your calendar for upcoming meetings, events and educational opportunities and stay up to date on federal and state government activity.
E-Ticketing National Workshop
December 6-7, 2022 | Savannah, Georgia
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), as part of the Every Day Counts Round 6 (EDC-6) initiative is offering a two-day workshop to bring State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and private entities together to collaborate on state-of-practice and innovations with e-Ticketing/e-Construction.
E-Ticketing Webinar Series
Virtual
The FHWA delivered a four-part webinar series on the Every Day Counts (EDC-6) initiative for e-Ticketing/eConstruction.
Ohio DOT’s Trailblazing Efforts on E-Ticketing
Slow and steady wins the race. Janet Treadway and her team at the Ohio Department of Transportation may not have had the famous old fable in mind in 2016 when they made the decision to pull back on a particular tech innovation, rather than aggressively driving it forward. The project was e-ticketing—and this was a surprising start to a journey that has ultimately earned OhioDOT respect and accolades as a national champion for the digital documentation and data management system.
“We were working on [The Federal] Every Day Counts 3 [innovation program], on e-construction, and one of the areas we started to home in on was documentation for daily inspections. And that led to the materials tickets,” recounts Treadway, AASHTOWare Project business administrator and Electronic Project Delivery Management lead in the OhioDOT’s Division of Construction Management. “But we quickly realized that the industry was not ready, that contractors didn’t see its value and that it would take all of their buy-in to make e-ticketing work. We decided to put our efforts into other things at that time.”
Member Spotlight:
Dr. Roy Sturgill
Roy Sturgill, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the department of civil, construction and environmental engineering at Iowa State University. Before this role, Dr. Sturgill worked as a research engineer in the Construction Engineering and Project Management program at the University of Kentucky’s Transportation Center and as an engineer at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC), which is the department of transportation in Kentucky. There, Dr. Sturgill worked in construction management and highway design conducting constructability reviews.
While completing his PhD, Dr. Sturgill had the opportunity to conduct research at the University of Kentucky where he focused on identifying research projects that connected back to his work at KYTC and realized that e-Ticketing had the ability to compensate for some of the shortcomings present within most DOTS. To read more about Dr. Sturgill’s work with e-Ticketing, access the research article here.
How did initially you become interested in e-Ticketing?
What initially interested me about e-Ticketing is its potential. To me, it’s a foundational technology that gets you moving in the direction of so many different opportunities. Whether that’s the elimination of paper tickets, making your data digital so that it becomes more useful, searchable, and so on. There are so many different things that it can do. In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of funny how simple it can be. With e-Ticketing, all you’re doing is transferring information from one system to another. I don’t know why it took us so long to figure that out.
How did you get involved with the e-Ticketing campaign and task force?
What initially interested me about e-Ticketing is its potential. To me, it’s a foundational technology that gets you moving in the direction of so many different opportunities. Whether that’s the elimination of paper tickets, making your data digital so that it becomes more useful, searchable, and so on. There are so many different things that it can do. In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of funny how simple it can be. With e-Ticketing, all you’re doing is transferring information from one system to another. I don’t know why it took us so long to figure that out.
What are some of the biggest challenges to e-Ticketing implementation?
Conducting a pilot e-ticketing program is relatively easy. I tell states that if they want to do an e-Ticketing pilot, all we need to do is call up a vendor and we can begin next week. The fundamental challenge here is making e-Ticketing an enterprise solution, meaning it would be involved in every project that e-Ticketing could possibly be used on. The sub-challenges that make it hard to make this an enterprise solution are things like working with small suppliers, having good connectivity and cellular connection and only having some components of e-Ticketing. For most of these little challenges, there are solutions that have come in some form or another and lots of different ways to tackle them. We still have a have a good way to go, but there are a lot of people working hard to make this a reality.
Keep an eye out at upcoming conferences and tradeshows for the National e-Ticketing Task Force displays.
If you’re interested in displaying this for conference reach out at info@e-Ticketing.com
■ NOVEMBER 2022
News and Insights from the National e-Ticketing Task Force
Indiana’s
e-Ticketing
Success Story
Materials delivery was always one of the biggest sources of paperwork for Indiana DOT.
“We have rooms full of this stuff,” said Joe Novak, INDOT state construction engineer. “We have to store those in a retrievable manner for 10 years to meet our state record retention requirements.”
With paper tickets, INDOT inspectors can face the end-of-shift each day with 50 to 100 tickets to manually add up and enter into the INDOT system. They often must hunt for paper tickets that are inevitably misplaced on busy road construction sites.
But over the last few years, the department has found a way to tame the beast; INDOT has been introducing materials e-Ticketing, the digital exchange, tracking and archiving of information.
Introducing e-Ticketing
INDOT’s implementation of the e-Ticketing system has been an evolving and carefully-considered process. The department began monitoring the technology in 2018. In the spring of 2020, when Covid hit, it began allowing any supplier to submit e-tickets via email. This reduced person-to-person contact, an important consideration early in the pandemic. To ensure the e-Ticketing system was accurate, INDOT kept logs of all trucks entering these sites. The pilot programs continued through the 2021 construction season.
New Research Quantifies the Benefits of E-Ticketing
State transportation departments are increasingly struggling to fill key vacancies. However, emerging technologies can reduce burdensome paperwork and free up existing employees to fulfill key functions.
That’s according to new research on the benefits of e-Ticketing from Dr. Karthik Subramanya and a team at the University of Texas Arlington. The paper was presented at the ASCE Proceedings of Transportation Consortium of South-Central States in July.
Quick Bytes
Exciting things are happening! Discover new participants who have joined the Task Force, follow media coverage of initiative innovators, mark your calendar for upcoming meetings, events and educational opportunities and stay up to date on federal and state government activity.
E-Ticketing National Workshop
December 6-7, 2022 | Savannah, Georgia
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), as part of the Every Day Counts Round 6 (EDC-6) initiative is offering a two-day workshop to bring State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and private entities together to collaborate on state-of-practice and innovations with e-Ticketing/e-Construction.
E-Ticketing Webinar Series
Virtual
The FHWA delivered a four-part webinar series on the Every Day Counts (EDC-6) initiative for e-Ticketing/eConstruction.
Ohio DOT’s Trailblazing Efforts on E-Ticketing
Slow and steady wins the race. Janet Treadway and her team at the Ohio Department of Transportation may not have had the famous old fable in mind in 2016 when they made the decision to pull back on a particular tech innovation, rather than aggressively driving it forward. The project was e-ticketing—and this was a surprising start to a journey that has ultimately earned OhioDOT respect and accolades as a national champion for the digital documentation and data management system.
“We were working on [The Federal] Every Day Counts 3 [innovation program], on e-construction, and one of the areas we started to home in on was documentation for daily inspections. And that led to the materials tickets,” recounts Treadway, AASHTOWare Project business administrator and Electronic Project Delivery Management lead in the OhioDOT’s Division of Construction Management. “But we quickly realized that the industry was not ready, that contractors didn’t see its value and that it would take all of their buy-in to make e-ticketing work. We decided to put our efforts into other things at that time.”
Member Spotlight: Dr. Roy Sturgill
Roy Sturgill, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the department of civil, construction and environmental engineering at Iowa State University. Before this role, Dr. Sturgill worked as a research engineer in the Construction Engineering and Project Management program at the University of Kentucky’s Transportation Center and as an engineer at the Kentucky Department of Transportation (KDOT), also known as the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, where he worked in construction management and highway design conducting constructability reviews.
While completing his PhD as an engineer at KDOT, Dr. Sturgill had the opportunity to conduct research at the University of Kentucky through the AI Transportation System. There, he focused on identifying research projects that connected back to his work at KDOT and realized that e-Ticketing had the ability to compensate for some of the shortcomings present within most DOTS. To read more about Dr. Sturgill’s work with e-Ticketing, access the research article here.
How did initially you become interested in e-Ticketing?
What initially interested me about e-Ticketing is its potential. To me, it’s a foundational technology that gets you moving in the direction of so many different opportunities. Whether that’s the elimination of paper tickets, making your data digital so that it becomes more useful, searchable, and so on. There are so many different things that it can do. In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of funny how simple it can be. With e-Ticketing, all you’re doing is transferring information from one system to another. I don’t know why it took us so long to figure that out.
How did you get involved with the e-Ticketing campaign and task force?
What initially interested me about e-Ticketing is its potential. To me, it’s a foundational technology that gets you moving in the direction of so many different opportunities. Whether that’s the elimination of paper tickets, making your data digital so that it becomes more useful, searchable, and so on. There are so many different things that it can do. In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of funny how simple it can be. With e-Ticketing, all you’re doing is transferring information from one system to another. I don’t know why it took us so long to figure that out.
What are some of the biggest challenges to e-Ticketing implementation?
Conducting a pilot e-ticketing program is relatively easy. I tell states that if they want to do an e-Ticketing pilot, all we need to do is call up a vendor and we can begin next week. The fundamental challenge here is making e-Ticketing an enterprise solution, meaning it would be involved in every project that e-Ticketing could possibly be used on. The sub-challenges that make it hard to make this an enterprise solution are things like working with small suppliers, having good connectivity and cellular connection and only having some components of e-Ticketing. For most of these little challenges, there are solutions that have come in some form or another and lots of different ways to tackle them. We still have a have a good way to go, but there are a lot of people working hard to make this a reality.
Keep an eye out at upcoming conferences and tradeshows for the National e-Ticketing Task Force displays.
If you’re interested in displaying this for conference reach out at info@e-Ticketing.com
