Keeping track of thousands of road and street work orders is no small task for the Boone County Public Works Department. Now the software used to monitor the projects is receiving a major upgrade.
Lucity is a set of programs that enable users to address work assignments, personnel and equipment, the software producer noted, adding it strives to meet organizing needs.
“The server operating system is due to be upgraded because of its age,” Boone County Information Systems Director Jason Gamble said. “Lucity informed us that they were also due to upgrade the version of Lucity as well.”
While the county’s previous Lucity licensing agreement was about $14,000 annually, it will now increase to $32,000 per year, Gamble said.
“The additional costs include hosting fees, back up disaster recovery, redundancy firewalls, plus all the hardware support the comes with these items,” Gamble said. “There’s also a one time software upgrade fee and a migration fee to move everything to their cloud platform of $30,700.”
When considering the possibility of seeking other vendors, the county took into consideration it has been a Lucity customer for over 15 years and the present system currently has over 66,000 road and street work orders, Gamble said.
“Given our history with the product and knowing it has served us well for this length of time, we’re recommending to stay with Lucity and perform the necessary upgrades,” Gamble said. “The new version provides enhancements and features currently not available in the version we are using today.”
Some funds were budgeted to allow for the upgrade, Assistant County Administrator/County Engineer Rob Franxman said.
“The process starts so early that it’s hard to know exactly what that cost was going to be,” Franxman said. “We’re probably about $20,000 short of what this full upgrade is going to be for the year. We’ll be able to pull that somewhere else out of some of the public works budget.”