Case Study: St Helens Council achieves cost-effective GPS mapping of 24,000 streetlights with Trimble GeoXT

Bright Ideas GPS Solution Lights the Streets of St Helens Bright Ideas—GPS Solution Lights the Streets of St Helens

St Helens Council needed a cost-effective way to locate and manage some 24,000 streetlights so call-centre staff could quickly identify faults on-screen and organise repairs. Asset descriptions sat in the Symology database while locations were scattered across paper maps and inconsistent datasets, and earlier PDA and backpack GPS approaches were either inaccurate, cumbersome or difficult to integrate.

The council adopted Trimble GeoXT handhelds with FastMAP CE and a workflow that exported Symology records to an Access holding database, captured GPS coordinates ward-by-ward (using students for field work), and synced updates back into Symology, MapInfo and the Planweb call-centre system. The project delivered accurate geolocation for 24,000 lights, faster and more efficient repairs, lower costs and easier training, and created a platform for future enhancements such as linking photos and mapping all highway assets.

St Helens Council

Jim Dutton

Engineering GIS Coordinator