When Vanderburgh County, Ind., got pummeled with two feet of snow in one storm, local road supervisors needed to keep track of where the plow trucks were. Geographic Information Systems were purchased to do just this, establishing what the county called an Automatic Vehicle Location system. But it didn't prove to be as automatic as officials there would have liked it to be.

Two scripts for the AVL system were developed: one that would collect locations for individual trucks at a given time, with another performing a data dump regarding task-completion progress and other needed information for all points. The scripts had to be run manually, which proved to be labor-intensive.

"When we first instituted the AVL tracking system, I spent 24 hours straight monitoring it following the first snowfall," says Greg Grabner, who serves as GIS supervisor for the county. "I had to be available at all times to collect data as it came in. Unfortunately, the constant demands of monitoring the AVL system were interfering with my other duties. It didn't make sense for me to lose sleep and waste time running these scripts manually, and putting someone else in charge wasn't a cost-effective solution."

So the county got itself a system upgrade, thanks to a solution called AutoMate from Network Automation, a Los Angeles-based software company. AutoMate integrated the two needed scripts on a business process automation (BPA) software platform, allowing the scripts to run on their own with no gaps in the data. AutoMate allows for such tasks as job scheduling, Excel operations, batch processing, report generation, data transformation, database queries, system monitoring and problem resolution to be integrated. All tasks are preprogrammed and described in plain English, so customers can get the system going even if they don't have programming capabilities.

In Vanderburgh County, all five of the county's snowplows are now outfitted with the tracking systems. The back-office Web interface updates the plow drivers' locations every 15 minutes, while a citizen-accessible online component offers updates every half-hour while major storms are taking place.

Grabner is now expanding use of AutoMate to update text files that can be converted into a point on a map, so when a snowplow crew member IMs with "truck broken down on Main Street," a backup crew can be swiftly dispatched to that area.

"We have a cost-effective and reliable way to automate our vehicle tracking," Grabner says. "And my time is freed up for other projects now."