Field Operations

While the rest of us are busy washing our hands, the folks in Nashville, TN and surrounding areas are recovering from damage caused by several tornadoes that touched down on March 2nd and 3rd – while also monitoring COVID-19. Seventy thousand residents lost power, 300 injuries were reported and 25 lives were lost. We can’t stop these events from happening, but when we respond with the right tools, we can help the Nashville Strong recovery take place faster.

Rivers serve as lifelines to the humans, animals, and plants in the areas where they flow. They naturally assume excess rain and minerals and nurture the growth of every living thing they touch. That’s why it’s imperative that we preserve our rivers and the natural space surrounding them. Rivers naturally change over time, but recently extreme flooding and other imbalances have caused the erosion of river boundaries, destruction of property, mold, and other problems that pose a danger to the surrounding people and area. Since 1981, the Tennessee River Gorge Trust has provided a helping hand to preserve the Tennessee River Gorge and the precious plants and animals that live and migrate in that area. The Gorge, a beautiful 26-mile canyon formed near the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, TN, is a wonder to geologists, who believe that it was formed some 290 million years ago.

We depend on millions of commercial vehicles — from semi-trailers to school buses — to transport people and goods every day. And every year, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) conducts about 4 million fleet inspections across North America to ensure they are operating safely.

Regular roof inspections are critical for detecting damage from severe weather, improper construction, and even regular wear and tear. Using a mobile roof inspection checklist can help you streamline the process and conduct more thorough inspections in less time.

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.

September will never be the same for the Bahamas. Hurricane Dorian obliterated the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama in a matter of hours, changing the island and everyone that lived there. At the present time, there are 67 reported deaths, 777 people living in shelters, 200 reported missing and thousands of residents are displaced. In one day, the northwest region of the Bahamas was forever changed and it’s expected to take years before it returns to a livable community.

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.

Haiti is home to mesmerizing beaches, tropical flowers, great food, and beauty reflective of the sun’s love affair with the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it is also home to hurricanes, earthquakes, torrential storms, flooding and the many issues that follow disasters, particularly in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

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.

The part of the world which I call home is a place in California that most people only pass through, or fly over, on their way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Recently however, I had the good fortune that NetHope was conducting its Bay Area Disaster Response Training (DRT) right in my “backyard,” in San Luis Obispo County, CA.

It was extremely hot and dusty as the caravan of humanitarian aid workers from Team Rubicon pulled up to a farmhouse in Matarara, Mozambique – 40 miles west as the crow flies from Beira, but a nearly 8-hour journey overland due to road washouts and poor conditions. Team Rubicon had arrived to as part of the Cyclone Idai response after the storm ripped through Mozambique and caused monumental flooding throughout the country.

In 1996, I went to work for Cambric Corporation in Salt Lake City, Utah as a deputy project manager for a telecom operations outside-plant (OSP) data conversion project. The client was Bell Canada, and we had three primary subcontractors, based in India, that were responsible for the vast majority of the labor in converting legacy analog engineering design and “as-builts” drawings in to a full AM/FM/GIS for roughly 255 telephone exchanges covering the eastern provinces of Canada. I was largely responsible for managing the production schedules, operations and quality control of our Indian subcontractors. This required a fair amount of time on the ground in India providing guidance, oversight, supervision and management of nearly 1,000 project team members for more than 18 months.

Fourth of July in Southern California was different this year. I’m sure most were prepared to enjoy family, friends and traditional fireworks. They most likely had made their last grocery store runs and mapped out their entertainment plan, when out of nowhere the plans were literally shook up. An earthquake measuring 6.4 in magnitude shook at 10:33 a.m., causing a swift change to the Independence Day celebrations in Searles Valley and surrounding areas. In classic Cali fashion, some felt the shaking happening and kept moving afterward thinking it’s normal California stuff since they have become accustomed to experiencing these tremors.

There’s a lot more to construction work than just — well, constructing. Contractors and project managers are also responsible for meeting deadlines, construction standards, and safety regulations.

If your field teams are still conducting inspections and surveys with paper and clipboards, it’s time for an upgrade.

As the Fulcrum Community Advocate, I had the pleasure of attending the National VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) Conference in Nashville, TN. It was a life-changing and definitely a life-saving experience for me.

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.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau launched The Opportunity Project, “a process for engaging government, communities, and the technology industry to create digital tools that address our greatest challenges as a nation”.

The toxic red tide bloom that has plagued Florida since November of 2017 seems to finally have dissipated. Last week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that the red tide organism, Karenia brevis or K. brevis, is no longer present in water samples.

I’ve always said: Ask me to run an office, and no worries, I got it! Then this task fell on my lap — a great combination of departments’ needs and wants, all to be managed by me. I needed to tag and inventory our assets. Sure, I think. Let’s use Google sheets and track the inventory. If only there was an asset management solution that I could use to take the information off a barcode and correlate it to an existing asset. Oh, wait — there is!

From conserving natural resources to reducing business costs, there are lots of reasons to switch to paperless fieldwork — but many companies have yet to do it. Maybe it’s because they’re attached to their familiar paper processes, or perhaps they’re simply reluctant to enact change.

One of the biggest benefits of using mobile forms is the time savings. So naturally, once you’ve made the switch from paper, you’ll want to get your field teams up and running as quickly as possible. In this post, we’ll show you an easy way to get your employees trained on Fulcrum and collecting field data in no time.

Offline data collecting from the field is an essential task across many industries, and recent advances have made it easier than ever.

Professionals across many industries — utility, engineering, and construction, especially — are giving up their antiquated pen-and-paper processes and switching to mobile forms, and for good reason. Taking inspection forms that have been filled out in the field and manually entering them into a computer is a slow and cumbersome process that takes otherwise productive hours out of the workday. With mobile forms, the information is entered just once on-site and gets synced to the cloud, where it is immediately available to clients and stakeholders. Even better? Switching to mobile forms is easy! With Fulcrum, you can create a custom mobile inspection form in 15 minutes or less. In this post, we’ll show you how.

In the last few posts, we’ve talked about the benefits of collecting and analyzing field data. Information gathered from the field gives businesses and organizations a unique advantage. It provides a foundation for more informed decision-making and helps them allocate resources more effectively.