For the City of Gillette, Wyoming, locate management is a coordinated effort across multiple utility departments working together to protect underground infrastructure and keep the community of about 33,000 people safe. As fiber buildouts in the area increase, crews are expected to keep up with rising ticket volume while maintaining accuracy and timely responses. With limited locators and a need for clear visibility into daily operations, the City of Gillette relies on KorTerra for accurate reporting and consistent workflows that keep operations running smoothly.
Managing locate requests in Gillette requires balancing efficiency, accuracy, and coordination across several departments. For the electrical department, this often means operating with only one primary locator clearing an average of 30 locates per day. In the summer months, ticket volume can double, and because most of the city’s electrical infrastructure is underground, nearly every ticket requires a truck roll. This makes daily planning critical and leaves little room for inefficiency.
At times, multiple locators must step in to help complete the increased volume, creating the need for clear organization so crews don’t duplicate work or miss priority tickets. Large project requests particularly from ongoing fiber construction can also include broad or unclear dig areas, making daily route planning and time management more challenging for field staff.
Emergency ticket awareness added another layer of complexity. Without immediate notification, urgent tickets could go unnoticed until much later, increasing risk. The city needed a way to maintain visibility, coordinate multiple responders, and handle increasing demand without adding administrative overhead or additional staffing.
To keep pace with daily demand, the City of Gillette’s electrical department relies on KorTerra to fit naturally into how their locators already work. Rather than complicating processes, the platform supports coordination between field crews, keeps locators informed in the field, and provides supervisors with visibility into performance, ticket counts, and trends.
· Real-Time Ticket Access: Tickets are accessible directly on the computer in each locate vehicle, allowing crews to review ticket complexity and plan their day without returning to the office.
· Actionable Reporting Insights: Reports can be easily pulled and shared with administrative and leadership teams to understand workload trends and support decision-making.
· Intentional Ticket Distribution: Using Ticket Splitting, the city distributes a single incoming ticket into separate work queues so each department can complete its locate independently without confusion or overlap.
The City of Gillette has experienced measurable operational improvements after standardizing daily work within KorTerra:
Faster Emergency Awareness: Automated alerts reduced response awareness from about an hour to roughly ten minutes, helping crews react quickly and reduce risk.
Coordinated Work Across Crews: Shared visibility and ticket assignment allowed multiple locators and departments to divide work without duplicate site visits or confusion during peak demand.
Efficient Daily Planning: Real-time ticket access in the field enabled locators to plan routes and complete work without returning to the office, keeping productivity consistent throughout the day.
Clear Workload Visibility: Monthly and annual reporting gave leadership a reliable view of ticket volume — even as annual locates grew from roughly 4,000 to over 7,300 — supporting staffing decisions.
“I’d give KorTerra a 10 out of 10. Our crews can all log in, see their work, and manage multiple locators at the same time without confusion. It works really well for our electric department and the rest of the city too — we wouldn’t move away from it.”
— Drew Dobitz, Electrical Superintendent
As construction activity continues and ticket volume rises, the City of Gillette relies on KorTerra as a steady operational foundation rather than a system requiring constant oversight. The platform allows multiple departments to coordinate their work while maintaining independence, helping the city scale without changing workflows or adding administrative burden. From daily routing to emergency awareness and long-term reporting, the software supports both field crews and leadership decision-making.
KorTerra is the leading provider of damage prevention software, protecting billions of dollars in underground infrastructure. For over 30 years, the leading stakeholders in gas distribution, pipeline operation, telecommunications, electric distribution, contract locating, and city, county, and state governments have trusted KorTerra as their damage prevention solution. KorTerra helps mitigate risk and ensure the safety of field personnel by providing secure software platforms for processing 811 locate tickets, tracking and reporting asset damages, meeting regulatory compliance, and more. Explore additional solutions at korterra.com and follow KorTerra on LinkedIn.
Media Contact:
Paige Nygaard – KorTerra, Inc.
952.368.1911
marketing@korterra.com