About the author
Jake is the head of product marketing for Fulcrum.
Great news! Fulcrum has entered a definitive Commercial Provider agreement with Esri™ to build on the Esri technology stack. What does that mean? Let’s break it down.
You already know that Fulcrum is the leading solution for field inspections and data collection, particularly when location capabilities are critical. And Esri is the leading geographic information systems (GIS) platform, with clients in virtually every industry that requires location-related data, mapping, and analysis.
These two types of systems are like beans and rice, chocolate and peanut butter… or, you know, field inspection management and geospatial analysis. As great as each is independently, bringing them together will make great things even better.
We’ve started to actualize that potential by entering into a definitive agreement with Esri to use its runtime software development kit (SDK) to integrate Fulcrum with Esri’s flagship ArcGIS™ product line. That means we’ll be providing a richer mapping experience across the Fulcrum platform and a stronger data exchange capability with Esri products.
Our first delivery on the Esri SDK for mobile, anticipated for early 2023, will add customer-defined labeling on pins, as well as clustering of pins, to make large datasets easier to work with – particularly on mobile devices. When you’re tasked with dozens of field inspections in a single day, using Fulcrum to increase productivity and data accuracy is great. But seeing the data immediately, on your mobile device, without requiring drill-down? That’s even better. It saves time on every inspection, and accumulating these time savings across dozens of inspections can make the difference between a successful day and missing your quota.
If you’re one of our industrial customers, working in utilities, oil and gas, water, or other field-intensive industries, integrating Fulcrum with ArcGIS data and map layers will enable you to expand your use of Fulcrum to new use cases. Capitalizing on Fulcrum for the rapid, low-effort deployment of new inspections is great. But when one of your Fulcrum users in the field needs rapid and regular access to customer data from ArcGIS Online, avoiding manual export/import makes that process even better, reducing the overhead required for data prep and moving content around between systems. And when that field worker has access to more and better information – not just the information for the specific site, but also data about the system that individual site is part of, such as transmission lines, roads, pipelines, and property areas — then their confidence, productivity, and capabilities go through the roof.
This is a beginning: We have a vision for integrating Esri to enhance Fulcrum’s capabilities, and we have an agreement to get started. There’s a ton of hard work yet to be done to realize the vision. We anticipate that we’ll start rolling out new capabilities in early 2023.
So watch this space. What’s already great is going to get even better.
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