"Caltrans is a state highway maintenance operation with a fleet of equipment that includes everything from dump trucks and backhoes to loaders, graders, street sweepers, mowers and more. After roads are built, state maintenance stations maintain them," explains Kathy Coots, a Caltrans area superintendent with responsibility for five such stations throughout the Sierra Nevada Mountains region of Northern California.

"We plow, mow, pick up dead animals, fill potholes, clean up toxic spills, clear rock slides and repair roads washed out by flooding," she says. "Before we started using Zonar's Electronic Vehicle Inspection Report system (EVIR), we had a book of four-part forms in each piece of equipment for doing the federally required pre- and post-operation inspections. You know, the 'be sure to press hard and write legibly' kind of forms. If there was a problem and we needed a history, we had to thumb through all that paperwork, which equipment operators did not much like to fill out in the first place. The bottom line was that record keeping was an ongoing problem.

"We were looking for a better way to get the inspection information and to access it later when we needed it. About four years ago we did a pilot test with the Zonar system on two of our trucks," Coots continues. "What we found was that drivers who could choose their equipment opted for the Zonar trucks. Today we have the system on about 60 pieces of equipment and we'll probably be up to 85 or 90 by year end.

"Now, the inspection reports are wirelessly downloaded and sent to the supervisor immediately; the driver doesn't even have to bring them into the office. And the information is accessible to any of us right away from Zonar's servers. That ease of access is wonderful, " she notes. "There is not filing, no digging through paper reports and all the reports are legible and follow a standard format. In the past, I've had to go to court and explain how I could tell who wrote hand-written reports that were utterly illegible (even when projected three-feet high on a screen in the courtroom) because I knew my crews. Today, our reports are much more professional.

"We have much better compliance with Zonar," Coots adds. "The people at Zonar have been great to work with, too. We had lots of special needs because we have so many different kinds of equipment, but they stuck right with us. I really think everybody will go this way for vehicle inspections; it is just so easy and so reasonable.
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