Quicker response, even when the problem is nowhere near

It’s Monday morning, so you don’t hear your alarm go off. You banzai it out of bed to get out the door. You flounder into your truck and make a mad dash to work. Not only are you running late, but you have a meeting in five minutes…it takes 15 minutes to get to work. You come up to a red light a few minutes from work and stop.

Watching the surrounding traffic continuously go by numerous times, you grow highly impatient as your light never turns green. You have been sitting at the traffic light for 10 minutes now. You're not just running casually late, but now you’re running sensationally late. Furious at this point, you wait for a clear opening and make a safe transition into traffic and continue on to work. All of us have been in that situation one way or another — if you haven’t, you must be the luckiest person alive.

Unfortunately when these types of emergency situations occur, our electricians try to respond as quickly as possible. Though in many cases, these emergencies are long distance and it takes a considerable amount of time to fix.

Traditionally, the guys would have to blindly collect numerous parts before going out to the location with all hopes they have the correct parts to fix the issue. In some cases, they would not have the right equipment to fix immediately and have to drive all the way back to the office, sort through inventory, and drive back to fix it again.

This happened earlier this year in Victor, but they were more than two hours away from the site.

With the help of IT’s Shawn Madsen, Don Randall, former traffic engineer Ben Burke, and D6 electricians Gary Wirkus and Josh Harris, the team worked together to find a reasonable solution. The end result of this impressive collaboration was the ability to remote access into the Tactics server, identify the issue(s) and resolve it in minutes.

“Today, we are able to remote into these signals and adjust the video detection (located on the signals) to work properly. Or if it a much more serious issue, we are able to remotely put a manual call into the controller itself until we are able to permanently repair the signal” says Wirkus. Working remotely on these signals has allowed the guys to virtually make one trip to fix the in-place equipment by diagnosing it before they leave the office.

This Tactics server system has allowed the team to remotely access any traffic signals that have communications installed.

Crews are able to adjust controllers and video-detection, and monitor for malfunctions. This has enabled the electricians to work more efficiently, saving time and money, while keeping the traveling public safe.

Published 10-26-18