AI data center power demands are reshaping how utilities plan, build, and maintain their electric grids and distribution systems. Faster development cycles, shifting load patterns, and new on-site assets create conditions that rely heavily on accurate, timely field intelligence. Utilities that adopt field-first workflows gain a clearer picture of evolving sites and a stronger foundation for decisions that support smart grid technology throughout each phase of AI-driven growth.
Reliable GIS starts with field mapping workflows designed for accuracy from the outset. These workflows keep field data and real-time data in sync with web maps and feature layers so spatial data stays trustworthy from collection to decision. By combining automatic GPS tagging, in-field validation, and mobile tools that streamline data capture, teams produce consistent data that drives dependable maps and actionable insights. With better data capture and digital workflows, projects stay accurate without wasted effort in the field.
Geospatial AI can forecast infrastructure needs, model environmental changes, and support critical decisions, but its accuracy depends on reliable field data. Fulcrum equips teams to capture precise, validated information in the field and send it directly into GIS and AI workflows. By maintaining accuracy from collection through analysis, Fulcrum helps ensure geospatial insights reflect real-world conditions. This streamlined connection ensures that your geospatial artificial intelligence models receive the most accurate, real-time spatial inputs possible.
Despite their decades-old prevalence, utility poles stand at the forefront of a technological evolution. As telecom companies build ever-newer networks, utility poles become essential equipment for both legacy electrical grids and cutting-edge telecoms. Doubling pole use benefits both utilities and telecoms, but these utility pole partnerships can present numerous challenges without proper oversight.
For the last installment of Fulcrum for Field Data Collection software, we explore the stories of some of our government clients – enjoy!
Welcome to the second of our series of stories around clients using Fulcrum to perform data collection in the field. For Part 2, we have non-profit organizations that use Fulcrum’s data collection forms in the field for charitable pursuits.
While at Fulcrum we often talk about inspections, what about the clients who use software not strictly for inspections, but for collecting field data? In the next few weeks we’ll be sharing some examples of clients whose use case doesn’t fit the mold of field inspections, and how they use Fulcrum to collect richer, more comprehensive data in less time and with fewer resources. For Part 1, we have corporate organizations that use Fulcrum to perform real-time data collection software functions in their important work around the world.
Making the switch from pen and paper
Maybe you’ve been contemplating making the switch from pen and paper for your utility pole inspections. Or thought about moving from collecting data on optical loss on fiber optic cable using a spreadsheet typed on a laptop on the hood of your car in the middle of nowhere. However, you don’t get any further because this isn’t the right time to upgrade to data collection software for utility field operations.
October 2020 was the turning point in the trick-or-treat journey for young Emily, now 14. “The weather was terrible that day,” she recalls. “I mean, it’s northern Illinois so what do you expect, but really? 34 degrees and sleeting?”
If it’s got four (or 18) wheels, sooner or later it will give you problems. From maintenance headaches to inspection snags to outright accidents, a lot can go wrong when you’re dealing with one vehicle, not to mention a fleet of them. A digital field inspection platform for fleet management can help minimize risk – and address problems when they develop.
From mussels to birds, hornets to fish, invasive species of every kind are wreaking havoc on people, property, and other species in the ecosystems they invade. This growing problem emphasizes the critical importance of controlling invasive species to mitigate their destructive impact.
The 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida, tragically resulted in nearly a hundred deaths. This disaster raised serious concerns about condo safety.
Doing field inspections is nothing new. Even back in the Stone Age, when Fred Flintstone was done with his workday at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company, Mr. Slate probably came around with a stone tablet and a small dinosaur with a sharp beak to chisel in the results of a field inspection of Fred’s work.
Although the use of lead in public water systems was banned in 1986 by the EPA, an estimated 15 to 22 million Americans’ drinking water supply still comes from lead service lines. Now, after 35 years of waffling, grandfathering, and stopgap measures, it looks as though a comprehensive lead pipe abatement initiative is imminent. The recently announced Biden-Harris Lead Pipe and Paint Action Plan seeks to finally replace lead pipes throughout the country by utilizing funds from the bipartisan infrastructure package as well as the EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.
OSHA makes your company do safety inspections. So do your insurers, your investors, your unions, your contractors, your state and local agencies. At times it may seem like a line of people is at your front door with pen and clipboard in one hand and a flashlight in the other, looking to nitpick and find fault. We invite you to move away from the mindset of the inspection as an annoyance, a deterrent, and a punishment. Instead look at it as a valuable tool with benefits far beyond those of keeping all the clipboard-wielders appeased.
Few words make a construction contractor’s heart sink faster than “rework” – redoing or correcting work that was not done correctly the first time. Construction work is all about margins – margins for time, employees, and profit – and these margins are notoriously thin. When something must be redone, or worse, dismantled and then redone, all of these margins quickly evaporate resulting in missed deadlines, cost overruns, and projects failing.
Having problems finding skilled construction workers? You’re not alone. The labor shortage has hit the construction industry particularly hard: home builder contractors estimate that nearly three-quarters of a million construction workers will be needed each year to keep up with demand and account for attrition, while 92% of commercial construction contractors report moderate to high levels of difficulty finding skilled workers.
Project safety and bottom line growth
Construction contractors are developing a new way of thinking when it comes to their safety programs. Construction safety inspections and field inspection management are no longer “a necessary evil” but are an integral part of doing good business. They have an effect on the bottom line that extends beyond simply improving insurance premiums.
You can achieve a robust safety program – and the benefits that come with it – by promoting an overall safety-driven culture through your people. In a biannual survey of contractors, the SmartMarket Report Safety Management in the Construction Industry 2021 from the Dodge Construction Network, in partnership with CPWR and Newmetrix, make this very clear when it states that “[c]ontractors of all sizes consistently regard safety efforts as people-driven rather than program-driven.”
The recent Dodge Report on Safety Management in the Construction Industry emphasizes training’s role in safety management. This emphasis is supported by evidence showing contractors’ dedication to worker safety training. Yet, the report identifies a concerning trend: the frequency of training significantly varies between companies and jobs.
Better safety programs through digital inspection data
The recent release of the widely-circulated annual SmartMarket Report Safety Management in the Construction Industry 2021 from the Dodge Construction Network, in partnership with CPWR and Newmetrix, re-confirms one of their long-standing findings: contractors consistently report that safety programs have a wide range of positive impacts on their business as a whole.
AI-powered aerial data platform Sitemark now uses Fulcrum to make it easier and more effective than ever for companies to collect field data, clearly visualize solar installation site anomalies, and take action to fix them – all on a mobile device.
With the integration announced earlier this year, customers of Fulcrum and Esri™ can now get more value out of their investments in both platforms. By sending high-quality, real-time Fulcrum data into Esri, organizations can get a clearer picture of what’s happening on the ground, analyze their situation more effectively, and make better, more data-driven decisions.
In a recent study conducted by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 95% of executives across several industries in the United States, UK, Singapore and India said that mapping and GIS location intelligence are important to achieving desired business results.
Two great features that aid image processing have recently been added to the Fulcrum no-code application platform: Adding multiple photos from the gallery and renaming photos on download.
With the mobile revolution, more and more users in field roles are discovering the power of location-based data. Whether it is used to trigger a workflow or process, or simply help visualize information on a map, users — particularly those who work in the field — are increasingly demanding location-aware apps to make their jobs easier and more efficient.
A manager is only as effective as the team they’ve built, and ensuring they have the right tools to get the job done is part of being successful. That’s even more critical when those teams are out in the field and responsible for day-to-day tasks without a manager being physically present. If your team members are working solo, outdoors, or in geographically diverse environments, managing effectively becomes exponentially more challenging.
Amid the election and pandemic, it seems every American has likely deepened their knowledge of U.S. geography. We’ve spent a substantial part of the year analyzing data. This data has pinpointed where the virus hits hardest, identified states reporting their election outcomes, and now, tracks the deployment of the coronavirus vaccine.
When you call 911, what’s the first question they ask you? What is your location? Knowing where you are — and being able to share that information quickly — is crucial to getting the help you need in a timely manner. Location matters. Not just in emergency situations, but in nearly all aspects of our personal and professional lives, from the most mundane decisions (which route should I take to work?) to the most pivotal (where should I buy a house?).
Keeping up with ever-changing environmental regulations can be a challenge, but for environmental engineering firms, it’s paramount for serving their clients as well as preserving the environment. In fiscal year 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency required companies to invest more than $4.4 billion to control pollution (called injunctive relief) and pay more than $360 million in civil penalties. Continuous, centralized recordkeeping is critical to ensuring compliance and avoiding penalties like these. That’s why today’s environmental engineering firms are adopting mobile environmental compliance technology to make sure they’re helping their clients meet state and federal regulations. It also helps them work more efficiently so they can complete more jobs in less time without sacrificing quality.
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.
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.
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:
If your field teams are still conducting inspections and surveys with paper and clipboards, it’s time for an upgrade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve worked very hard to design Fulcrum so that it’s as easy as possible for our customers to use. In doing so, we’ve managed to “hide” a lot of the complexities around form & database design that many other platforms expose their users to. By dragging and dropping fields in our form builder, users are essentially creating a complex database without even being aware of it. Here are five important digital form building tips, in no particular order, that can assist new users when building their first form.
One fire (or flood) away from failure
The statistics behind data loss are alarming: 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.1 And with more than 4.6 million episodes of catastrophic business data loss happening each year2, could your business survive such an event? And what could you do to prevent the problems of catastrophic data loss from interrupting your business? Today I’ll discuss the true cost of a paper-based business workflow and how digital forms mitigate the risks that come from relying on physical forms and paper record keeping.
I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on mobile data collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics. They were familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.
Earlier this year, Applied Geographics (AppGeo) and Spatial Focus launched a three-month pilot for an address reference system in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The project covered St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas for the Office of Lieutenant Governor Gregory R. Francis. During the pilot phase, the team assigned 1,500 of roughly 120,000 addresses across the three main islands.
