The Fulcrum Focus

Deploy digital cleaning & sanitization checklists at scale to protect workers. As talks begin about lifting the restrictions on nonessential businesses in the wake of COVID-19 closures, some business executives have expressed concern about the consequences of doing so too quickly. If employees return to work, contract Coronavirus, and believe they returned prematurely or to unsafe conditions, mass lawsuits could follow.

Last month, we shared a video walking you through the steps of creating a custom mobile form with Fulcrum’s drag-and-drop app builder.

Last week we hosted a hands-on workshop on data collection with Fulcrum during the NetHope Summit in San Juan. As part of the joint workshop from myself and Mapbox’s Mikel Maron, we wanted to showcase how to go from the beginning to end — creating a mobile collection survey through field collection all the way to visualization (online or disconnected) with Mapbox’s Atlas server.

Data collection can be beneficial for just about any business. You can streamline processes and workflows by asking the same questions across your entire workforce, and receiving the information in a specified format.

If you’re a firefighter, you need a hose. If you’re a surgeon, a scalpel. As NetHope prepares to help assess and respond to the devastation of Hurricane Dorian, we need a full complement of digital tools to aid the work in emergency situations.

If you work in construction, you’ve probably noticed smartphones, tablets, and other new technology solutions appearing on job sites over the last few years. If you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you might even find them annoying: Why create complicated new processes when the old ones work just fine?

The systems that provide our world with power and electricity require enormous amounts of utility data and compliance monitoring to function effectively. Energy and utility companies must constantly monitor, analyze, and respond to events that affect these complex networks to ensure their customers have electricity. What’s more, the production and distribution of energy are subject to numerous regulations, making utility data and compliance requirements crucial for operations to be documented in meticulous detail. The ability to streamline and integrate data coming in from multiple sites is critical to staying ahead of these demands.

You have probably noticed that many companies have switched from paper to mobile forms, whether it was while checking in at the doctor’s office on a tablet or signing for a package with a stylus.

Since we introduced Fulcrum in 2011, the team at Spatial Networks has worked continuously to improve the platform and scaling Fulcrum to become the industry leader in field data collection, as well as to mature as both geographers and software developers. We like to think we’re succeeding on both counts.

At Spatial Networks, we strive to be your go-to source for geospatial data and the industry leader in mobile data collection technology. We continue to improve the Fulcrum platform and help our customers all over the world discover new ways to save time and money and streamline their business processes.  With another exciting and productive year in the rear-view, it’s time to take a look back at Fulcrum 2017 highlights while we review the last 12 months here at Spatial Networks!

As we just wrapped up a great 2016, it’s important for us to plant some flags for 2017. We’re constantly evolving and improving our platform, so clear milestones ahead of us can be both immensely helpful to guide our team toward shared goals, and also give customers a 2017 Fulcrum roadmap about where we’re headed strategically.

This year was a great one for Fulcrum. Since 2011, it’s been our mission to make communications and data capture more seamless between the office and the field, and the growth in diversity of our customer base has proven that it’s a challenge worthy of solving — that organizations in many verticals are faced with poor back-and-forth process with field operations.

This is part 3 in our series about feedback loops, improving data quality, and reducing the time between response and action. In this part, we’ll identify ways to directly improve feedback loops and highlight various tools which can help you communicate information into actions that will help you achieve your goals.

I had the opportunity to represent Fulcrum at the inaugural DroneDeploy Conference in San Francisco, CA last week. One of the goals of the conference was to “focus on real-world drone deployments across industries driven by people”. The conference had people in attendance from an array of industries including end users, software providers, and developers interested in folding aerial survey data into applications.

In the days of pen and paper, organizations collected, transcribed, and stored data in physical file cabinets. These cabinets retained information for a minimum of five years to comply with potential audit requirements. With advancements in digital data capture, organizations use forms software, spreadsheets, or sensors to gather information. However, many have not updated their processes significantly, limiting progress in effective data management. Now, the physical file cabinet has been replaced by outdated spreadsheets or an aging Access database. Organizations often accumulate large amounts of legacy data, justifying costs based on operational requirements. Due to the complexity of data management, organizations frequently re-collect the same data unnecessarily. This redundant collection results in added expenses without delivering any real benefits to the organization. Once entered into corporate systems and used initially, much of this data becomes forgotten and unused.

Recently IFAW sponsored the tenBoma project, an effort to improve reporting, tracking, and enforcement to counter wildlife crime in Kenya. Fulcrum is playing a key role on the ground to help the Kenyan Wildlife Services (KWS) catalog events associated with poaching activities. For the last several months, KWS personnel have been using Fulcrum for on-the-ground event tracking and counter-poaching investigations. During a recent trip to Voi, Kenya, near the Tsavo East National Park, I had to pleasure of working with KWS personnel and a team from Agile Analytics Group to assist in workflow development and field collection process. During the trip we refined the Service’s workflows, and how Fulcrum could better be used to support operations.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to think about what you know in your industry and how you can share that information. A couple weeks ago, I was invited to speak at O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, where I talked about web map libraries and emerging geo industries technologies. Here are some few discoveries and thoughts I had about the experience.

Jason Wheatley is the Geospatial Technologies (GIS) Manager for Century Engineering, Inc. in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He has worked in both the public and private geospatial industries since 2004. He received a B.S. in Geography, as well as a M.S. in GIS and Public Administration from Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD). The Century Geospatial Technologies Group (GIS Group) provides technology consultant services to clients within federal, state, local governments, as well as the private sector throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region.

This month in our continuing series of customer interviews, we talked with one of our long-time customers in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies are a growing user base for mobile data collection applications, and Fulcrum is a great match for manufacturers because it offers an integrated mobile solution that speeds up quotes, customer service, and order management. Real-time data capture is what differentiates the leaders from the rest. Mike Merrill is the NDE Coordinator & Field Service Tech at Turbine Master. He has worked there since 2000 and has seen many changes that technology offers to workflows. Our team sat down with Mike and asked him about his data collection methods, the turbine industry, turbine inspections, and the future of data collection technologies.

As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished! Read on for Fulcrum’s 2015 year in review.

The first in our series of customer spotlights, Blaine Hackett is the Director of Business Development, GIS for RESPEC. Blaine has been working with Geographic Information Systems since 1990. He received his B.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Masters of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked in diversified GIS environments including state and local government, consulting engineering and planning, non-profit and Fortune 500 companies. Our team sat down with him and picked his brains on data collection methods, the GIS industry and the future of geospatial technology.

Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) intended to showcase various cloud-based technologies for the GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) market, with speakers from HumanGeo, Agilex, DigitalGlobe, and more. The objective was to give quick lightning talks on cloud-based platforms enabling GEOINT capabilities, as part of the USGIF Innovation Task Force series.

This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to develop mobile GIS data collection software that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.

As part of yesterday’s update to support complex relationships between data types in Fulcrum, we also added another new powerful capability that makes offline fieldwork even easier for teams.

We on the Fulcrum team work hard to make collecting your data a breeze. And we’re always thinking of ways to make Fulcrum more valuable and powerful for you, our customers. To that end, we are pleased to announce the release of webhooks for Fulcrum.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring Fulcrum for iOS to the next level, making data collection even faster and more powerful. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up with tons of features and improvements all around, as well as a whole new refreshed look and feel. Announcing Fulcrum 2.0!

In our previous post, we shared our experience at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School at Camp Roberts, CA. JIFX provides a unique setting for field experimentation, bringing together industry, academia, and government to test and refine technologies in real-world conditions. Unlike traditional demonstrations, this event places engineers and their systems side by side, enabling direct collaboration and hands-on integration. Proving success—or uncovering failure—in this environment helps stakeholders see technologies in action while allowing engineers to push the limits of their software, hardware, or systems. As an engineer and designer of Fulcrum, participating in this kind of field experimentation is invaluable, providing firsthand insight into how the platform performs in dynamic conditions and where improvements can make it even more effective for field data collection.

Last week, Tony and I spent the week out at Camp Roberts in California, testing Fulcrum in the field with FEMA for disaster relief needs as part of the RELIEF field experiments.