First Week of CARS Training for Consultants

This has been a fun first week of training. Got to train WisDOT employees on Thursday, as well as our first consultant group on Friday. It was good practice at teaching the entire manual.

For the most part, the reaction to our training has been great. If you have already trained, we appreciate your patience as we work out all the kinks. We have plenty of training sessions to go, and hope to do better each time.

Consultants, once you have been trained, please email me your CARS Access Request form so I can get you set up in CARS.

If you have not signed up for training yet, you can go to this link to sign up.

A question I've gotten from many consultants was about which firms have had the training. Since invoicing is a coordinated effort between primes and subs, firms would like to know what other firms have had the training. That list of trained firms is here.

As always, feel free to email me or leave a comment here.

CARS - where we've been and where we're going

Welcome to the CARS blog!

This will be WisDOT’s interactive blog to help keep everyone in the loop. Bookmark it now!

We'll try to address a bunch of issues with this blog post. If you have a question about CARS, please leave a comment.

As of today (Sept 22), we have had 8 training sessions in CARS. We have trained about 100 WisDOT employees on the use of CARS, as well as all of our Management Consultants.

Our training consists of hands-on training on navigation within the program, approving invoices, and creating evaluations. Many of the people in training have never used CARS. After some initial comments on the training, I am trying to make sure our training is slow enough to make sure everyone can follow along.

The training sessions are very helpful for us to help understand the particular enhancements that WisDOT employees and consultants think would benefit the CARS application.

This upcoming week, we have WisDOT Training on Sept 25, followed by our first consultant training on Sept 26 and Sept 30. In all, we have 81 people to train in the next 8 days in CARS.

One question that many of you have had is, "when is the time to use CARS?" The time to use CARS is whenever the WisDOT project manager and the consultant have had training in the system. All invoices and evaluations will need to be processed in CARS by March 1, 2015 to have all evaluations and invoicing done in CARS.

Here is a list of firms that have had training, or will in this upcoming week:

• all Management Consultant firms (training occurred on Aug 26)
• AECOM
• KL Engineering
• Ayres
• Kjohnson
• Baxter and Woodman
• Walling Consulting
• Kapur & Associates
• Fish & Associates
• HNTB
• Mead & Hunt
• Cedar Corporation
• TerraVenture Advisors
• Becher Hoppe
• CORRE
• MSA Professional Services
• JT Engineering
• Knight E/A
• EMCS
• Strand
• Soils and Engineering Services
• Coleman Engineering
• Single Source
• DAAR Engineering
• Westbrook Associated Engineers
• Strand Associates

We will be holding training in the CARS Application from now until February 18, 2015. The list of training dates can be found here.

For more information on CARS, remember to regularly view the CARS site on the Internet

If you any questions or comments, please email me, Dan Meinen (dan.meinen@dot.wi.gov) or my supervisor Sharon Bremser (sharon.bremser@dot.wi.gov).