Field Operations

The term “data collection” may sound esoteric, but the practice is actually quite broad. Data collection is a vital process that every business conducts regularly, even if they don’t call it that.

Collecting field data can be a complex process, requiring time, money, and people. That’s why logistics are important. A successful project design will save you from wasting time, energy, and resources, and ensure the most reliable data possible.

In our last post, we explored how and why businesses gather and use information from the field. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into some of the different methods for collecting data.

What is field data? Data that is captured in the field is some of the most valuable information available to a company. It provides a clear picture into what’s happening at a job site or point of transaction, giving managers and other executives the insights they need to make informed business decisions.

Successful enterprise asset management is key to reducing costs and increasing productivity and profitability for any organization.

 Field data collection is by no means limited to the confines of terra firma! NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary has been successfully using Fulcrum to help city, state, and federal agencies in offshore data collection, accessing, and sharing marine enforcement data across California.

Successful data collection starts with a good survey. How you design your questions will have a tremendous impact on the way data is collected, processed, and analyzed. We’d like to share some of our best advice on building a proper field data collection survey.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused widespread destruction across Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Now, engineering faculty and students from several U.S. universities are using this disaster as a learning opportunity.

Poachers beware! Counter-poaching organizations have a new app at their disposal to identify, track, and destroy elephant poaching networks thanks to Fulcrum.

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.

Coleman McCormick speaker notes – IAOO 2016

Thanks for visiting! These are the notes and links from my talk at IAAO 2016 — Automating Field Data Collection. Below you’ll find links referenced or mentioned in the talk, the slides for download, and contact info to get in touch.

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.

Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. Without constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Constraints can involve cost, time, attention, tools, or materials. Avoiding “feature creep” is crucial — it adds unnecessary complexity. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer. The engineer’s task is to identify, understand, and interpret design constraints. It is usually not enough to build a technically successful product; it must also meet further requirements.

When working with our customers, we talk a lot about pain. That is, the sorts of pain your business deals with right now that we can help resolve. We make software for business productivity, so people come to us with some form of pain, hoping that we can help them get to the bottom of it and fix their problems. We focus on understanding the root pain points of business worfklow processes.

Climate change profoundly affects animal and plant communities. During periods of warming or cooling, ecosystems near the geographic edge of their range experience the impacts first. For example, the ‘islands’ of spruce-fir forests atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina face such early effects. These ecosystems serve as a ‘canary in a coal mine,’ offering an early indication of larger-scale changes that may follow.

Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.

Recently I joined the board of the Homeowners Association in my neighborhood and discovered what many others have discovered about their HOA: a lot of frustration around management of the community and the lack of support the residents receive from the board. According to the Community Associations Institute trade association, it is estimated that HOAs govern 24.8 million American homes and 62 million residents. This leaves about twenty percent of Americans living in a community managed by an HOA.

With the ongoing widespread flooding and tornadoes affecting the southern United States, I’m compelled to write this post. It is directed towards the emergency managers and incident commanders in affected towns and counties and is meant to provide you with guidance on how to expedite disaster declaration using simple off-the-shelf technology. One of the chief goals of emergency managers should be to decrease the amount of time it takes for survivors to receive the assistance they require. This was my goal for five years while I worked for FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. Fulcrum will continue to offer our services to any emergency manager who needs assistance.

Guest blogger J Allard is CEO and Founder of Project 529 and a Core Team member of the Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force. This post was originally published May 18th on bikeportland.org.

Guest blogger Danny Sheehan is a geographer and data science student with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.

House of Hope story

My name is Megan Smith and I am an outreach worker with the House of Hope CDC. House Of Hope is a nonprofit that provides a spectrum of housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of preventing and ending homelessness in Rhode Island. Toward this end, my role consists of collaborating with community partners to engage individuals not well-served by the current homeless service provision system. We’re specifically focusing on those who are staying on the streets and are experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges.

Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.

Historic preservation

Historic building preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

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.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I worked for five years at FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. I spent my days collecting disaster-related data, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps. Senior leadership at FEMA and state governments then used these maps to support decision-making.

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments, including this project for qualititative and ethnographic research in Ethiopia.

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

Keep track of changes with full version history

In addition to yesterday’s announced data management improvements with the launch of full-text data searching and filtering of content, we’ve also included another powerful capability for managing field service work: data versioning.