Brown and Caldwell, an environmental firm, works with water and wastewater agencies across the United States. They were seeking advanced technologies and tools to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase accuracy to meet clients’ most pressing needs. As utilities look to create more comprehensive inventories of their water and wastewater systems, mobile apps and tablet devices are being used to collect data and help build the foundation for robust asset management systems. In particular, the use of mobile apps and smart devices has proven to improve productivity for the geographical location, inspection, and assessment of wastewater collection systems. However, before the switch to mobile technology, the Brown and Caldwell team gathered historical data from record drawings into GIS and exported them to paper map books. Inspection crews would attempt to locate these structures. Paper forms were used to get collection condition information. More than 60,000 photos were taken using digital cameras. Another team of surveyors, both conventional and GPS-equipped, would follow to get to precise location and rim elevation of these structures. Areas that had been redeveloped or which contained new structures proved problematic for the two crews. Overall, project workflows were prone to disruption, and were large, complicated, and had intersecting tasks.

Before switching to Fulcrum, Trimat had laptops assigned to their service employees to write up their inspections in Microsoft Access, on an old system that was built eight years prior. Inspectors in the field would conduct an on-site inspection, and then, while in their car or back in the office, write up their report in the Access database. This process was time consuming and often led to errors in data and incomplete information. Trimat looked into rebuilding the Access system or building a new in-house system and had received quotes exceeding $10,000.

Green Mountain College was facing challenges in streamlining their traditional mapping techniques which involved the use of paper maps, a field notebook, camera, and handheld GPS. Over the years, they tried different technologies including an inexpensive consumer grade Garmin, the Trimble GeoXT and the Trimble Juno, to Collector for ArcGIS running on an iPad mini. However, many of these options still required paper maps, external camera or additional software to create data dictionaries. The college was in need of a solution that could combine all the needs of traditional mapping within a single interface.

Northpower, a multi-utility contractor in New Zealand, was facing challenges with their pillar inspection process. They were using Windows Mobile-based phones with an ArcGIS forms solution to capture inspection results, and paper-based maps to log and navigate to each pillar. This process was inefficient and had several issues. The form created by a third party couldn't be easily updated or maintained, and Windows Mobile was no longer a widely-supported platform. The system wasn't trusted enough to maintain data integrity, forcing inspectors to hand-write inspection results before entering data. Without electronic maps to pinpoint pillar locations, 10% or more could be missed on a patrol. The interface with the back-end systems lacked validation & automation capability.

TREKK Design Group, a civil engineering firm, was facing several challenges with their inspection and data collection processes. They were using outdated paper-based inspections which were not compatible with their existing Access databases and EsriTM ArcGIS OnlineTM. They were also facing quality control issues with their field data collection, including inaccurate or irrelevant data and missing location information. Inspections of incorrect assets or structures within complex lines or grids were also a problem due to inaccessible or missing spatial components. The teams were also frustrated with non-purpose built inspection and data collection tools while trying to deliver on customer reporting and compliance requirements. Unreliable hotspots and Internet connection also resulted in teams “flying blind” in the field, unable to access databases or reliably collect information.

Desert Channels Queensland (DCQ) is a community-based not-for-profit organization that provides funding to assist landowners across the Queensland section of the Lake Eyre Basin to undertake projects that improve water quality, restore ground cover and native vegetation, protect habitat, and rehabilitate erosion. They run multiple projects that are all planned and run based on surveys and data, and all require ongoing monitoring. The challenge was that managing projects over such a vast area used to require compromise due to limited resources. Data collection and processing was time-consuming and only the bare minimum was done. Personnel had to be sent out on survey or landholders would bring in maps, monitoring sheets or GPS points, maps had to be interpreted and digitised, data sheets entered and GPS data downloaded. This was all resource hungry—510,000 square kilometres, numerous projects, 15 staff = big challenges!

A major gas utility in the northeastern United States was faced with the daunting task of physically inspecting all of their approximately 2.1 million gas meters to comply with expanded mandated natural gas meter inspection requirements announced by the Public Service Commission (PSC). The utility had to locate all the meters, inspect them to ensure they were in good working order, and take photos to verify to the PSC that the inspections had been completed. The utility's current data was collected on paper and digitized, but it was rife with misspellings, omissions, typos, and there was no established nomenclature. The utility needed a digital workflow that would get everyone on the same page, eliminate inefficiencies, and enable the field techs to work a lot faster.

Halton Company, a global technology organization delivering complex indoor air solutions, was facing several challenges with its quality control inspections. The company was using paper-based quality control forms that were filled out as products traveled through the manufacturing process. These forms were then manually scanned and filed away into a directory on a server. The data was not in an easily usable format and was not supporting any other quality initiatives. The paper checklists promoted cursory examinations, often resulting in incomplete quality control audit documentation. The company was unable to share quality control inspection data to promote constant improvement and had ineffective and delayed identification of quality issues.

Degenkolb Engineers, a leading earthquake engineering firm, was tasked with ensuring that hospitals in California complied with the state's Seismic Compliance Program. This program required hospitals to provide documentation that all their equipment and interior components were sufficiently braced to withstand a major earthquake. The firm was initially using a paper, pen, and camera method of data collection, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Photos required a numbering system on a small whiteboard to identify the shot, and significant time was required to organize the data and link pictures to individual entries.

The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) was tasked with identifying problematic coastal lighting that could affect the nesting habitats of endangered sea turtles in 25 conservation areas. This was a part of a contract with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). The contract required IDA to establish baseline measurements of night sky quality along the beach in these conservation areas. Before finding Fulcrum, IDA’s data collection consisted of manual pen-and-paper recording to be organized in Excel, leaving data open to inconsistency and reporting issues. Without GIS integration, GPS data was manually recorded alongside other information, making organizing and analyzing difficult.

Village Earth, a not-for-profit organization, was tasked with conducting a housing needs assessment for five American Indian Tribes in South and North Dakota. The aim was to challenge existing Federal Census data, which often undercounts rural populations due to difficulties in data collection. Many Native American Reservations lack a complete inventory of households, consistent addressing systems, or even marked roads. Additionally, it is common 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. The technical approach to data collection also presented challenges in terms of efficiency and team management. Issues included quality control monitoring, distribution of work, and data digitization.

In 2019, the State of Michigan required water providers to complete a water distribution system material inventory. This inventory needed to include water service line material information and be complete by January 1, 2025. For the City of Wyoming, a community of approximately 75,000 residents with over 20,000 water service lines, this information needed to be better organized and aligned. Also in 2019, the City of Wyoming began implementing an Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) network, transitioning away from the manual water meter reading process. Additionally, approximately 50% of the water meters in the city will be replaced within the next 5 years. Staff sought a solution that was able to collect, retain, report and map all of the information needed for the water service line material inventory and AMI endpoint and water meter installations, as well as link between different billing and work order systems.

Carrington Risk, a consulting firm that helps companies manage all types of risk across their properties, was struggling with the process of surveying client's properties for potential risks. The CEO, Kristin Carrington, would have to take the paper report from the previous year with her and mark changes on it with a pen. Then she would go back to her office and create a new report of her findings — making changes to the Word document, entering recommendations, and matching up photos. These reports are often up to 50 pages long. Kristin knew there had to be an electronic solution to her report-writing problem, so she took to the Internet to find it.

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department (SBCFD) in California is tasked with performing defensible space inspections on more than 16,000 buildings in their area each year. Defensible space is an area around a structure designed and maintained to reduce its fire risk. During an inspection, firefighters conduct a structural survey on the building to identify its material makeup and ensure it has a 100-foot buffer, free from dead trees and overgrowth. Until recently, the department used paper inspection forms, an inefficient process that made surveying every structure in the county a challenge. This system gave SBCFD no visibility into how many inspections each of its 16 stations were responsible for. One station might complete two dozen inspections, while another had a backlog of thousands — more than they could possibly complete in the time allotted. And it was difficult (if not impossible) to know how many inspections had been completed, or if any buildings in high fire-danger areas were not in compliance, putting residents at higher risk.

HaMaarag, a consortium of organizations responsible for managing Israel’s natural resources, was facing challenges with their traditional pen and paper method of conducting field surveys. The group studies and reports on seven wildlife classes across Israel to contribute to the advancement of knowledge-based management of natural resources. The traditional method was prone to digitization errors, data loss, and bias, which could degrade the quality of their data and analysis. The organization decided to switch to a mobile solution to create a centralized database, which is crucial for statistical analyses.

Premier Utility Services was preparing for a large gas meter inspection and leak detection project in upstate New York. This project involved surveying over 3,300 miles of pipeline and the inspection of over half a million gas meters, which included a scheduling component to facilitate field visits for meters located inside buildings. As they began transitioning their fieldwork operations to the Fulcrum platform, they requested technical support to help facilitate this transition.

Before the implementation of 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. The details of these conversations often got lost due to the volume of people they interacted with. Once they had their notes together, workers would manually transfer the data into the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a database mandated by their funders. HMIS is neither mobile- nor user-friendly, and is prohibitively expensive for a nonprofit organization, so House of Hope’s software licenses were limited to fulltime employees, which meant interns were not able to access critical data.

GreenCollar, an environmental markets company, manages over 445,000 acres of forest in Australia. They use environmental markets to protect these forests from deforestation, which requires technical survey, monitoring, evaluation, and management systems. These systems also need to be audited by third parties and government agencies. The company collects a variety of data, including forest biomass data, flora & fauna survey data, verification of roads and tracks, monitoring of farm infrastructure condition, and assessment data on a property to examine a project’s ability to move into the next phase of analysis. However, the large volume of data collection and management, along with the need to complete projects efficiently, was restricted by the delay between collecting data in the field and analyzing it back at the head office to determine the next steps of their projects.

The Cancer Registry of Baja California Sur was facing challenges in collecting and analyzing medical records and related data for the purpose of scientific research and public health policy formulation. The existing process involved field staff collecting all data by hand on paper and manually entering patients’ locations. This method was time-consuming and often resulted in inaccurately recorded locations. The COVID-19 emergency further complicated the situation, requiring the rapid collection and analysis of data to efficiently allocate resources and avoid duplicating efforts in delivering support packages.

The Philadelphia Water Department was in the process of removing their high pressure fire hydrants, which were left in place after the High Pressure Fire Service (HPFS) system was decommissioned in the mid-1990’s. Rodriguez Consulting was brought into the project to provide a final inventory of the hydrants and to document any potential construction impacts to surrounding street features such as ADA ramps, paving, poles, etc. The initial assumption was that the inventory would be performed using paper maps and digital cameras. The objective of the asset inventory was to assess the location of existing inactive HPFS hydrants and the potential impact that removing the hydrants would have on the surrounding pavement, street furniture, and ADA ramps.

Celerity, a telecom contracting company, was facing a challenge with their data collection and storage methods. Their field technicians and engineers were collecting massive amounts of data while conducting route maintenance, inspections, and feasibility studies for their customers. However, their manual collection and storage methods were becoming too time-intensive. They needed a digital platform that would enable them to collect and store data all in one central location. They were looking for a scalable and customizable solution. They tried a few different mobile forms apps, but they were not worth their time or effort due to the price point.

RedZone Software is a company that monitors developing wildfires and deploys fire engines to mitigate the threat to its clients’ assets. After firefighters arrive on-site and respond to the threat, they document everything. This documentation is easily shared with insurance companies and property owners. Initially, RedZone developed an in-house solution for firefighter documentation. However, that solution did not scale to an exceptionally large user demand.

Tilson, a company providing Outside Plant (OSP) engineering, permitting, and construction management in the Telecom and IT industries, was facing a challenge. They had recently been awarded a statewide fiber construction project for the state of Kentucky to provide broadband access across the state. The project involved surveying 10,000 utility poles—including attachments, spans, and specific attributes—and providing a make-ready engineering (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. 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.

VicTrack, the owner of Victoria’s transport assets, was facing challenges with their paper-based inspection system. The traditional method brought several issues, including delays in getting the results to the office, the need for manual transcription of information into their maintenance management system, and the need to match up photos captured on digital cameras. Additionally, their spreadsheets were often complicated and subject to tampering by contractors, resulting in a lot of work to extract value from the information. Their Windows Mobile devices required docking in the office for synchronizing and were not necessarily intuitive. The requirement to dock them in the office to get data off them meant days or weeks of data collection was always susceptible to being lost whilst out of the office.