Problem: New Legislature was put in place requiring contractors to go through Miss Utility(company) to ensure that the land they are working on is not owned by Maryland Transportation Organizations. If it is, they must have the area painted to mark electrical, water lines or any other entity they might hit when they begin digging. Miss Utility alerts the MD Transportation Orgs via e-mail of new tickets from contractors and gives the state 48hrs to respond to the ticket and/or paint/clear the area. If they do not respond they are charged a fee per ticket. For auditing purposes this needs to be done in an efficient way due to the volume of tickets that can range from 30/day to 300/day.
Challenge: Develop tools using Salesforce and Custom Salesforce integration to create tickets in Salesforce from the e-mails. Route these tickets to the appropriate offices within MDTA. Provide an easy interface for the users to update the ticket, contact the contractor if necessary and track their progress. And an automated way to send the ticket back to Miss Utility to avoid fines.
Solution: Using SF e-mail services we were able to parse out the e-mails from Miss Utility and create tickets in Salesforce. Using workflows we pass these tickets and alert the proper offices in MDTA. Upon the user updating the ticket status we have developed a VB.NET integration that grabs a set of “ready tickets” passes them in the proper XML format(via a custom web service) that Miss Utility requires and places them for FTP to Miss Utility. When Miss Utility sends back a response, the Integration tool pulls the results and then pushes them back to SF via a custom web service. This then updates the tickets and closes it out(if appropriate).
Benefits/Results: Fewer fines since the tickets are categorized and organized. Quicker response back to Miss Utility. Automatic delegation of work due to automatic routing. Less paperwork as this was done semi by hand before. Significant time savings due to very little needed interaction by the user. Auditing advantage for security against lawsuits since all of the information can be pulled quickly. Dashboards and reports for management to see which region needs to speed up, if they were billed incorrectly for tickets etc.