Speeding the route to
vehicle safety

Every year, officers of the Government of British Columbia's Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement (CVSE) unit perform approximately 35,000 roadside inspections of commercial vehicles. They're checking for safety violations and ensuring that all commercial vehicles meet the standards set out in the Motor Vehicle Act Regulations. In other words, they're making sure the province's roads are as safe as possible for everyone.

It's a vital task, but until recently, it was hampered by delays in getting inspection information from the roadside into the CVSE database. Inspectors completed forms by hand and forwarded them to the nearest regional office, which then sent them to the central office. This meant the same data was entered three separate times, a process that was time-consuming, costly, labour-intensive and could be prone to errors. Worst of all, accurate data about non-compliant vehicles was not immediately available to enforcement officers, which meant that unsafe vehicles or drivers could be posing continued dangers to other road users.

To solve the problem, CVSE began developing a business case for automating the process by creating a complete mobile field inspection solution.

Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement in British Columbia

Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement falls under the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. As a Government office, the unit is required to use a competitive selection process when looking for new partners and providers, so a request for proposals was issued.

However, the unit's management team already knew that there wasn't a single existing solution that met all their needs. One would have to be created specifically for them. "We had done a bit of an environmental scan ourselves and were pretty sure which way we wanted to go," says Rob Kroeker, B.C.'s Director of Commercial Vehicle Safety. "But what was avant garde about this was that we were looking to have one service provider. We wanted a single source for the hardware, the wireless communications structure, the software and the development."

As one of the providers bidding for the contract, TELUS coordinated a complete solution, calling on the expertise of a number of different TELUS units and developing a preferred status relationship with a Victoria-based developer of electronic forms solutions. "TELUS prevailed, not just on price, but based on the quality of their solution and their expertise as well," says Kroeker.

A complete, single-source solution

For each inspection, a CVSE officer completes an eForm on a ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook tablet PC. The information from the form is encrypted and compressed for security, then transmitted via the private TELUS 1X wireless network to a highly secure TELUS Data Centre in Victoria. Finally, a link to the B.C. Government's own data centre makes it available to any authorized CVSE or enforcement officer who needs it. In this way, information that previously took 14 days or longer to become available is now accessible in mere minutes, with a minimum of manual effort and a significant improvement in the quality of data. Because data is only entered once, there are far fewer opportunities for error, resulting in greatly increased accuracy.

To make everything work seamlessly for CVSE, TELUS provides a single-source, integrated solution that includes procurement, implementation, deployment, hardware, network, hosting, application integration, support and training.

Specifically, TELUS provides:

• The eForm and custom Java application, developed with PureEdge of Victoria and installed on tablet PCs
• TELUS Mobility cell phones, PC air cards and 1X wireless network, with TELUS Mobility partners subcontracted to provide and install vehicle mounts
• Design, configuration and deployment of the servers at the Victoria Data Centre
• Network connectivity between the Data Centre and the TELUS Mobility network

Currently, the solution is in its pilot stage, with full rollout expected shortly.

A very positive experience

"Our experience has been very positive," says Kroeker. "The solution not only delivers an automated form, it has also allowed our patrol staff to deliver a number of other functions through wireless. For example, they can now look up vehicle and driver data from their truck, which is something they couldn't do before. There's been enormous uptake of this from our staff, a complete endorsement of it."

Another advantage for CVSE is that the solution is fully scalable. It can expand and incorporate additional elements on an as-needed basis. It's also repeatable, which means that similar solutions can be developed on an accelerated basis, leveraging the knowledge and expertise already gained. In fact, TELUS has already bid for and won a follow-up project and is currently designing another automated form to be used by garages that do government inspections of commercial vehicles.

Kroeker has been particularly pleased with the positive working relationship that has developed between CVSE and TELUS. "TELUS has brought a customer service bent to the project and shown a complete willingness to meet our needs."