In the next three months, the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) plans to launch a new field of its Find & Fix mobile application (app), which will extend the initial app to its field agents for more prompt repairs on reported incidents.

Field agents are personnel from the JRA who are responsible for road infrastructure and repairing any damage or correcting faults pertaining to the roads in the City of Johannesburg.

The JRA explains that a key element in the upgrade will be features that will provide real-time updates, which will remove the human element and digitalise the process of reporting on and repairing damage on the roads.

With this element updated for JRA’s field agents, the app will hopefully increase productivity and maintenance rates, as well as provide field agents with up-to-date service requests that require attention in their respective areas.

The JRA adds that, when an incident logger updates the app about an incident on site, the field agent will get an immediate update from the app’s push notification service, which will allow for the incident to be dealt with immediately.

Moreover, after the incident reported on has been dealt with, field agents can attach an image to the app that shows the repaired site so that incident loggers can see the quality of the repair being done by the field agents.

The JRA believes that these updates and extensions will encourage more people around the City of Johannesburg to log in and report on more incidents pertaining to roads and infrastructure, after seeing how quickly the JRA is attending to and solving the problem.

Moreover, since the agency launched the app about a year ago, it has recorded about 15 000 downloads of the app and, to date, had about 35 000 incident loggers.

As a result, the updates and upgrades are important, as they pertain to service delivery, which is important to people in the City of Johannesburg. Also, the app will be integrated into the works-order management system of the JRA.

Having received the Public Sector Industry Award for the app in October last year at the Microsoft Partner Awards 2014, the JRA believes that the app will gain more recog- nition this year owing to the upgrades being done on the app.