Land Audit Management System (LAMS)

What is LAMS?

The LAMS (Land Audit Management System) is a quality inspection system to monitor grounds maintenance and/or street cleansing. If you are a member of APSE’s performance networks you will be able to use LAMS to measure the quality of your own localities, and at the same time benchmark these against other local authorities. You can choose between using the system to monitor grounds maintenance, street cleansing and/or cemeteries/crematorium land maintenance.

How to set up LAMS

How to use the LAMS app

‘The randomiser’ 

The App has been further developed this year through the introduction of a self-randomiser which automatically allocates an inspection list of sites to inspectors. The randomiser also includes a map and direction details (Sat-Nav) for all planned inspections via the App.

How to administrate the LAMS app randomiser

How to the use randomiser function in the LAMS app

Download the LAMS Information booklet

Case studies 

Trafford Council

Our journey to using the randomiser was fairly simple, following the User group meeting in February:

1. We initially used a street list extracted from the LLPG for the randomiser, which contained almost 4,500 street records. This did contain separate street records where a road passed through multiple Wards. This was very quick and easy to set up and probably only took a couple of hours to complete and upload the database to the Bbits app.
2. However, when we tested the randomiser, we felt that this allowed too much leeway for inspectors to choose any section of longer roads to survey. In order for the survey selection to be fully random, we felt that we needed the app to send the inspector to a specific section of a road, and thought that a postcode would be a suitable site size.
3. I obtained a list of all addresses from the Trafford Datalab (open data section of the Council), which contains more than 123k addresses, with Ward and latitude and longitude detail. From this list, I identified around 11,000 unique postcodes (of which 450 were outside Trafford!). I then applied various filters to remove PO Boxes, unadopted alleyways, sewage works and any other locations that fell outside the scope of the survey locations.
4. It took me around 3 hours to refine the address list to a list of 9,300 survey sites and upload this to the randomiser.
5. We have been using the randomiser since March, with the exception of the April surveys, when our main Client inspector was working from home. He likes the GPS element of the app, as he was previously using a pizza delivery app to plan his route! We have also had very positive feedback on the ease of use of the randomiser from Amey supervisors  
6. I think the app is great: allocating 5 sets of surveys to 3 different inspectors takes me a couple of minutes a month, and I have full visibility of any incomplete surveys (email notification when an inspector does not complete an assignment within 48 hours), and can reallocate surveys as required. This is an easy way to ensure we get an equal number of surveys across 5 target Wards each month.

Cheshire West

The benefits are as below

Initial works to get your road networks does take time but the benefits are worth it and it’s a one off piece of work.

1. No need for the officer to plan where he’s going.
2. It only takes 10 minutes to assign a months’ worth of inspections to an officer probably an hour for a years’ worth.
3. As many officer as you can be assigned inspection as long as they are in the system.
4. It cuts the times of doing surveys in half.
5. Given the current situation with COVID no paperwork totally Paperless so no contact required. 
6. The app Navigates the Inspectors right to the point of inspection so saves lots of time.
7. Once you have used the randomiser you will never want to go back to the old way it’s so easy for the inspectors.

East Riding of Yorkshire

Using the LAMS application has streamlined the way in which inspections are carried out eliminating the need for printed sheets and manual inputting of results. One of the more lengthy processes was selecting sites for inspection, printing of maps and directions and allocating the sites to inspectors.

The introduction of the “Randomiser” into the application has now resolved this problem and made the task of selecting sites a simple one off process.

The longest process with the randomiser is creating an import table but this is a one off task.  We used the site information contained within the Confirm Asset Management system and a few days’ work saw it completed.

Now all we have to do to select sites for inspection is to log onto the desktop application, select the officer, the ward, type of inspection and the number of inspections required.  The system sends the randomly selected sites to the officer’s mobile device ready to be inspected.

Officers have taken well to the use of the randomiser, they particularly like the navigation function that will take them to the exact location for the inspection.

The randomiser has helped us address a comment in a recent internal audit where LAMS was highlighted as a good resource to monitor the performance of the Grounds service.  The only negative point was that the selection of sites was controlled by one person and could be biased towards certain areas.  The randomiser has removed this concern and satisfied the auditors that a representative selection of sites will be inspected across the authority.