Overview
What is 811?
In the United States, each state has an organization with the responsibility to coordinate utility locating services for anyone planning construction projects. The construction planner, whether a home owner or a contractor, can call “811” or use their state's website to log a request to mark any utility lines (water, sewer, power, telephone, network, etc...) that might be in the vicinity of their construction project.
The state agency has a list of organizations and businesses assigned the responsibility for locating each type of utility line. Those organizations will respond to the service locate requests so that the construction project can proceed safely.
This “811” service is a single point of contact within each state to receive utility location requests, route them to the proper organizations and to review the status of utility locate service requests.
What is BOSS811?
BOSS811 is a cloud-based hosted application offered by BOSS Solutions to provide an environment where utility provider management and locate field crews can stay on top of service requests coming from the state's 811 agency.
What does BOSS811 provide?
It provides different levels of information for your organizations staff:
- Dashboard summaries of service requests for management to be aware of demand and backlogs
- Immediate notification of emergency locate requests for management and field crews
- Well-defined summary lists of service locate requests with searches and filtering
- Bulk edits and closings to quickly update/resolve service locate requests
- Multiple levels of users to allow managing and controlling changes to service requests
- Automated ticket routing and resolution to minimize manual effort
How is BOSS811 organized?
The BOSS811 hosted solution will interact with your state's 811 organization to receive all utility locate service requests and to pass status updates for all completed/closed service requests back to the state 811 agency. Your staff can use either a web browser or a mobile app (iOS or Android) to review the service request list, manage the assigned workload, reassign service requests, update the status of service requests, close/complete service requests and review service request history.
How does BOSS811 process utility location service requests?
BOSS811 has built-in tools to streamline utility location requests (tickets) in order to minimize the number of service requests needing an individual response. BOSS811 automatically groups a service request for multiple utility types (water, sewer and storm water drainage for example) into a single ticket, with multiple response codes, so that closing the ticket allows you to assign an individual response code to each utility type or you can assign the same response code to all service types when you close the ticket.
BOSS811 allows you to define ticket routing rules that “pre-process” tickets as they are received in order to speed up their handling and review. For example, if you want to flag all service requests that mention “CATV” in the service request, you can define a ticket routing rule to assign a tag to those tickets and then filter the ticket list by that tag so service requests for utility types you do not offer can be bulk closed and removed from the active ticket list.
To enhance the search capabilities, BOSS811 allows you to save search criteria with a unique name and then re-run that search at a future time.
BOSS811 is flexible. If you want to add information to a service request, BOSS811 allows you to define custom fields for each ticket. You can chose from a wide variety of field types (single line text, multi-line text, integer, date, etc...) and mark that field as required or optional. That data is then available for filtering and reporting.
BOSS811 also supports direct communications with the BOSS Solutions support staff. Each page of the application has a “Feedback” tab. With one click, you can send information to BOSS Solutions about the application. Your information will be directed to the appropriate support staff for review and response.