Background

Many factors can cause delays during project development and construction. Two sources of delay that TxDOT officials and highway contractors frequently mention are utility adjustments, and the environmental review and clearance process. The interaction between utility coordination/conflict elimination and the environmental assessment process has not been examined in a way that would optimize either process. An opportunity exists to identify utility conflicts and concerns during the environmental assessment process. Additionally, gains in efficiencies may be possible by moving certain utility coordination and conflict elimination activities upstream in the project development process and integrating those activities with the environmental process.

The TxDOT Business Process Explorer (TxBPE) is an interactive web-based viewer that displays a business process model (BPM) that facilitates the interaction between environmental and right of way/utility activities in the TxDOT project development process. This BPM covers early planning through project letting. In general, the BPM includes boxes that represent activities and arrows that represent inputs and outputs. Other components of the BPM are documents, milestones, and decision points. These components are arranged in horizontal layers called swim lanes that assign activities to functional areas (e.g., Environmental, Preliminary Design). For consistency, all activities within one swim lane have the same color.

Note: Microsoft® Internet Explorer® Version 7 or later is required to access the full functionality of TxBPE. Older versions of Internet Explorer may work but have not been fully tested. No additional plug-in is needed.

TxBPE Levels

Level 1 - Overview BPM. This level shows the BPM at the highest aggregation level, with activity groups and major milestones. Click on a group to view the associated BPM activities at level 2.

Level 2 - Detailed BPM. This level shows activities, documents, and milestones. For simplicity, each Level 2 view only shows a portion of the entire BPM. Click on an activity, document, or milestone to open a separate window that shows related text descriptions and sample document at level 3.

Level 3 - Text Descriptions and Sample Documents. This level shows detailed descriptions of tasks and subtasks by linking directly to the corresponding TxDOT manual or reference document.

Go to Page (Direct Page Access). To access a section of the BPM, select the page using the drop-down button and click on the green arrow.

Pan and Zoom. Click the plus (+) button to zoom in, the minus (-) button to zoom out, and whole page button to display the whole page. Click-and-drag the red rectangle on the mini map to pan to a different area of the page.

Search Pages. Enter text in the search box and click on the green arrow to search TxBPE at level 1 and 2. When a user clicks on a search result, TxBPE zooms to the page and displays an arrow to indicate the location of the component.

Other Resources. Click on a link to download a BPM in PDF, access a TxDOT manual, or open an online resource.