Field Operations

When you think about field inspections, what comes to mind? Probably something like this:

In part I of this series, we talked about the importance of productivity and speed in workflow automation. That puts a lot of pressure on the inspector to be quick — there’s no faster way to have people resent the time you spend “checking boxes” than to take a long time doing it.

As a property manager, it’s your job to not only help your clients preserve the value of their property, but to ensure it stays in compliance with local ordinances. In many states, a code violation multiplies every day it goes unresolved. So a $1,000 violation, left unattended for a week, becomes an $8,000 violation, and so on.  To protect your clients (and your company), you need to conduct regular inspections, respond quickly to problems, and confirm that your contractors are performing high-quality work.  Between contracts, inspection reports, and maintenance records, it’s a lot of paperwork — and paperwork is the enemy of expeditiousness.

How to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of field operations with our mobile data collection and workflow automation platform.

In part I, we talked about increasing productivity in safety, quality, and other inspections. Then, in Part II, we talked about increasing rigor and speed without sacrificing quality. In this post, we’ll talk about speeding up your organization’s reaction time to events that happen in the field is made possible by automating workflows with Fulcrum.

In our last post, we talked about how workflow automation can increase productivity in safety, quality, and other inspections.

Field inspections are a critical part of maintaining safety, compliance, and operational excellence. However, outdated processes often lead to unnecessary delays, inaccurate data, and reduced productivity. Modernizing field inspections provides a clear path to better performance by streamlining workflows and equipping teams with the tools they need to succeed.

Your health, safety, and environment (HSE) inspections require you to collect a lot of data. But if you’re using paper-based checklists, you’re only getting a fraction of the benefits you could receive, without the kind of productivity that you need. Read on to learn why digitized HSE inspections are the best for data collection processes.

Fulcrum workflows automate the process of taking the data you collect and pushing into new processes — without any additional effort from data collectors or their supervisors. We’re excited about it because it’s the first step to helping you:

Providing risk management consulting to large commercial clients with Fulcrum.

Engineers and technologists collaborating to provide comprehensive asset management solutions.

Sharing knowledge on how to preserve dark skies and reduce light pollution on local, national, and international levels.

Helping landowners track invasive species and obtrusive wildlife across Queensland, Australia.

Preventing deforestation and protecting natural resources in Australia.

Clearing landmines and other explosive remnants of war in countries recovering from conflict.

Monitoring natural resources across Israel to ensure long-term sustainability.

This nonprofit uses Fulcrum to help connect people experiencing homelessness with available resources.

Helping government councils manage their assets and track maintenance teams in remote areas of South Africa.

Providing expert advice and services to governments, development partners, and private sector organizations across Sierra Leone.

This short video describes how Desert Rangers groups use Fulcrum to support better conservation efforts and local education in Australia.

This public outreach from Desert Channels Queensland includes a demo of how Fulcrum helps ordinary people track feral animals and weeds.

This short video shows how better data is helping five sovereign Native American tribes represent their populations to the US government.

Northpower, a leading multi-utility contractor in New Zealand, needed a better system for electrical infrastructure inspections. Its outdated Windows Mobile devices and paper maps caused inefficiencies and missed inspections, creating safety concerns and data inaccuracies. With 85,000 pillars to inspect over a three-year cycle, the existing system couldn’t keep up with its growing needs.

Molecular-bioscience researchers studying natural diversity in nematodes (or roundworms) in Hawaii.

Protecting homes and infrastructure from wildfire with real-time data.

Conducting hydrant inventories to aid in civil engineering municipal works.

For engineering projects, field asset inventories are essential to maintain infrastructure, track assets, and reduce costs. This case study shows how SMEC, a major global engineering firm, achieved these goals. Using Fulcrum’s mobile data platform, SMEC transformed its approach to inventories across diverse projects.

Conducting telecom, cellular, and pre-fiber inspections across the United States with Fulcrum.

Inspecting rail infrastructure networks and performing asset maintenance and land management.

Empowering tribes to collect their own Census data on Native American reservations.

Maintaining 85,000 acres of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Using Fulcrum digital inspection software to optimize your retail operations
Retail store audits can be extremely valuable market research tools for understanding the sales environment for products in brick-and-mortar sales environments. Understanding patterns of customer service, product placement within store footprints, standards for stocking procedures, and competitive product analysis. This can help better understand several layers of the merchandising / retail process.

Building, integrating, and deploying bespoke technology tools to help businesses solve complex challenges.

Inventorying water distribution systems, installing new meters and automating billing processes.

Paper is an amazing tool. Think about it. Anyone can use it, it’s consistent, it requires zero training, and it’s inexpensive. In the technology age, the truly wise will not forget the lessons in simplicity from the great days of the pen and pencil. But we can do better. In field data collection, paper should be the inspiration, but not the operation. Here are four reasons why you need to consider the alternative to pen and paper surveys — mobile data collection technologies:

Since the release of SpatialVideo back in June, which allows you to collect GPS-tracked video from Fulcrum on iOS and Android, we’ve heard dozens of different ways that users are recording video for various projects. For covering large work areas quickly, video is great as it saves time, and allows field staff to capture large volumes of reference data for review and assessment in the back office.

GIS has become a newly cherished friend to the environment, standing out as the only tool multi-faceted enough to create predictive models. These models incorporate the multiple relationships and compound effects involved in environmental impact decisions. To gather the data for these essential models, fieldwork requires many man-hours. Read on to learn how environmental data collection has evolved.

The Problem

Tilson had recently been awarded a statewide fiber construction project for the state of Kentucky to provide broadband access across the state. The project was to survey 10,000 utility poles—including attachments, spans, and specific attributes—and provide an MRE solution for each pole in order to apply for an attachment license for the fiber cable. Tilson had been utilizing several other data collection apps, with mixed results. Prior to Fulcrum, Tilson was primarily tackling projects that had 50 to 500 poles for a given project, primarily small cell nodes. The collection process often involved taking photos with a camera and a GPS unit, writing records in Excel, then joining them back up in the office. Tilson needed a solution where data was only keyed in once, could be monitored remotely, and exported in a variety of methods easily.

‍Tribal data collection challenges

Household data collection is never cut-and-dry, especially on rural Native American Reservations, which often lack a complete inventory of households, consistent addressing systems, or even marked roads. Because these difficulties lead to lack of accurate records about houses in rural areas, rural populations are often undercounted compared to urban areas. It is quite common on many Native American Reservations for Tribal members to locate a house or mobile home on their own land without registering it with their Tribe’s housing authority, making it virtually impossible to find using existing records.

Inspection challenges before Fulcrum
Paper-based inspections brought all the usual headaches, including the lag waiting for the results to arrive in the office, the need to get the information manually transcribed into our maintenance management system, complicated further by the need to match up photos captured on digital camera.

Modern civil engineering with Fulcrum

SMEC was investigating mobile applications for efficient field data collection in order to deliver a high quality end products (complete asset inventory) to their clients, and began to use Fulcrum to perform field asset inventory on many different projects. To date they have successfully completed asset management work for government organizations, international funding & aid agencies, utility companies, and private sector clients using Fulcrum. Fulcrum provided SMEC’s team with an all-in-one mobile solution with a wide range of features that go far beyond simple data collection. So far they have created over 95 custom Apps in Fulcrum to collect over 20,000 assets for dozens of projects within South Africa.

The Challenge
After a series of deadly explosions, including two high-profile events in 2014-2015, the Public Service Commission (PSC) announced expanded mandated natural gas meter inspection requirements. To establish a baseline, gas companies must prove to the PSC that they have physically inspected all of their residential and commercial meters by April of 2020.

Before Fulcrum

In California, where millions of acres are consumed by wildfire each year, county fire departments are required to conduct defensible-space inspections to protect the property and residents of their region.

Field asset inventory with Fulcrum
The Philadelphia Water Department is in the process of removing their high pressure fire hydrants, left in place after the HPFS system was decommissioned in the mid-1990’s. Rodriguez was brought into the project to provide a final inventory of the hydrants and to document any potential construction impacts to surrounding street features (i.e. ADA ramps, paving, poles, etc.). The assumption was that the inventory would be performed using paper maps and digital cameras.

The Problem
Through a sophisticated system of data collection, enrichment, and analysis, RedZone monitors developing wildfires and deploys fire engines to mitigate the threat to its clients’ assets.

The Problem
A team of seven graduate students, researchers, and technicians were embarking on a three-week nematode study on the Hawaiian Islands. They needed a way to track each sample from the point of collection, take photos, and mark the GPS location of each collection site. Since they would be gathering thousands of samples, they knew they needed a simple, electronic tool to take out into the field.

Before Fulcrum
Northpower performs 85,000 pillar inspections over a cycle of 3 years. Until recently, Windows Mobile-based phones with 2.8” displays were used with a forms solution to capture inspection results. Paper-based maps were used to log and navigate to each pillar to conduct inspections.

Guma Valley Water Corporation
For our first assignment using Fulcrum, we were contracted by the World Bank and Guma Valley Water Corporation (GVWC) – the Government owned utility responsible for providing clean water to the inhabitants of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The Problem
Before Fulcrum, House of Hope outreach workers would spend a few hours on the streets, talking with clients and taking notes on paper, then come home and write down who they spoke to and what the conversations were about — as best they could remember, anyway.

The Problem
HaMaarag is a joint operation of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael – the Jewish National Fund, with funding by the Heritage Project of the Prime Minister’s Office. The group studies and reports on seven wildlife classes (vegetation, birds, large mammals, small mammals, reptiles, invertebrates, and isopods) across Israel to contribute to the advancement of knowledge-based management of natural resources.

The Problem
“The challenge we had with some of our clients was that the methodologies and standard operating procedures we assisted them with was mostly paper based, which obviously has its limitations and is quite a cumbersome process,” said Louis Pienaar, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Asset Management. “We set out to see how we could assist them to improve these processes.”