Hello. Thanks everyone for joining us on the Field to Office conversation. I’m Chelsea. You’ve probably seen me a few times before. This is John, his first speaking session.
So very excited to toss this over to him.
I’ll just go through a couple of, like, housekeeping items. So the session’s gonna be recorded. I’ll send you all of this information after this wraps up the video processes.
Feel free to drop your QA in the QA section, or you can chat if there’s any, like, questions throughout, just, like, technical things. I’ll keep everyone muted just so everything’s clean, but at the end, I will help facilitate the q and a session.
It should be around thirty to forty five minutes of content, so we have more than enough time for your questions at the end. I’ll pass it over to you.
Hey. Yeah. So I’m John Beeson.
I’m a customer success manager here at Propeller. So I am I work with, you know, a large number of, organizations that range from, you know, mining and aggregates, civil, landfills, so various workflows and needs. This slide says I’m book smart, but I’m very dyslexic, so I don’t really read books very well. But I do have a background in geology and GIS, so that is where my expertise lies. And then, you know, Chelsea just introduced herself.
So we’ll go ahead and get underway. We’re gonna talk about field to office. So just for some context, I’m gonna kinda go over, you know, my experience with some of the folks I work with and, you know, some of the constraints and the pain points that they have with field office communication. And then I’m going to go in and actually demo what the mobile app looks like and common workflows and use cases that I’ve observed over the last few years that I’ve been working at Propeller.
So most sites, there’s a translation problem there where the field sees what’s going on in real time. They have the context. They’re seeing it happening in person. But then in the office, there can be that translation problem where the communication can be delayed. It’s not as efficient.
You might have folks who… The office might be anywhere from forty five minutes to three hours away from the actual site. And so getting that real time context, communicating where features are, where assets are, where work needs to be done, can can be… Become an issue because, you know, you’re pretty much limited to, you know, text messages, you know, phone calls, even pulling somebody to leave the office and actually go go on-site and, you know, and look at it. And so, essentially, you know, with the Propeller mobile app, this… It’s an avenue to really connect, you know, the people in the field with the office and optimize and make that communication a lot more efficient because it’s an opportunity for the people in the field to see the same thing that the people in the office are seeing, get the same insights, make the same decisions, have decisions made easier and communicated easier, and things like that.
So at this point, again, capturing updates in the field with context is very important, especially with the mobile app.
A photo or a measurement, it’s great. But without the context, without the location, knowing what assets are around it, what stage you are in your project, without that information, a photo or a measurement doesn’t have as much power or weight to it. And so when you make these measurements, when you take images in the field, everything is geolocated and placed in the platform. So someone can pull up the measurement while they’re standing right over where that cut fill or that stockpile might be being measured.
Or the person in the office can go and find exactly where that additional context is. So a photo identifying a safety hazard or something like that.
That’s where you can actually get that clear communication between those two locations.
A great example with a organization that I work with in Dane County, Wisconsin, they’re a landfill. And they recently made some changes to the actual landfill itself. And so where the locations of their vacuum wells, where they’re releasing gas and whatnot, those needed to be documented you know, via images to see if there’s any damage or any changes, if they got covered up by, you know, what they did to the surface.
And prior, you know, before you realized what you could do with the mobile app, he was taking images, texting them to, you know, the the person who needs to… You know, needs those documented, emailing them.
But with the mobile app, he could go out, pull up his site, see where he was in real time, take a picture of those vacuum wells, and even comment… Add a comment and tag the person in it. So it’s all documented. It’s all on the site. It’s all on the map.
So it really just creates a centralized repository where everybody can access their data really easily.
So that’s enough talking and looking at this slide of four words. So I’m gonna go ahead and, just sort of show some examples of what the, mobile app can actually look like.
Bear with me for a second.
See.
So I’m gonna show two two of our demo sites. So this is a road project, And then I’m also gonna show a subdivision build as well.
But just gonna kinda show you the the kind of context you can get with it. So this is essential… You know, this is an emulator. So this is still my computer. It’s not the actual, you know, app on my phone, but this is pretty much what it looks like. And, you know, just general navigation purposes, you know, and also just for added context here, like, let’s pretend we’re somebody… Like, a field worker, and I’m just standing out on-site, and this is what I would look at. So this is the Propeller mobile app. You know, if I click those three lines in the bottom left, you know, I can look at the organization, which… That’s my name, the site, the survey, all that jazz.
Then down here, you have, your different, options for tools and whatnot. So, you know, measurements. So this is where…
What I was talking about earlier, you know, somebody in the office, any measurement they make, you know, you… Will populate here, and you can go and check on them. So stockpile measurements, you can check on those.
Markups, anything that occurs in the office will show up in the mobile app.
Also, the designs. So for… You know, the first thing I wanted to show is, you know, let’s say you’re doing a road project and you need to see your station and offset in real time. So you can go into your design files here and turn on the alignment.
And then here, you know… And, again, since I’m not in the field, you don’t see a blue dot. But, like, if you were in the field and I were standing in some art… Arbitrary location within this map, there’d be a blue dot like you see on your GPS on your phone, you know, for, like, Apple or Google Maps. You know, it’s the same thing.
So… But for this, you know, example, obviously, it’s not gonna show up.
But if you look up here, this shows you the survey elevation at this little crosshair in the middle. So if I move around, you know, everything updates. The the elevation will update. It’s a little slower.
I have to stop it. But you’ll see the station offset. You know, as I move this around, it’ll show you exactly where it is. So it makes, you know, finding locations that are, you know, given using a station offset very easy, very simple.
It makes it easy to find assets that are, you know, located, you know, using those sorts of coordinates really easy in the map because, you know, when you zoom out and look at this as a whole, there’s a lot of noise going on, a lot of trees, vegetation, buildings around the road. So the mobile app makes things a lot efficient…
A lot more efficient in viewing locations on, say, a road project, whether you’re in the office or in person. Because, again, this is something you could view on the desktop as well.
This also makes it really easy to find buried assets. So let’s say you’ve got underground utilities in the field and, you know, it’s already been buried and it’s, you know, difficult to locate. So you could go on… Go here and turn off your…
We’ll turn off this alignment here.
But then if you upload your design, so, like, your underground utilities in an IFC file, you can go and turn those on.
So we’re trying to turn on the pipes here.
And then what you’ll see is it’ll is it’ll actually populate down here. And so, you know, kind of like any other map navigation on a on a mobile app or a GPS, you just use your fingers to zoom in. Use your fingers to pan around. You know, it’s very intuitive in that way.
And so right here, we’re looking at a pipe, and it’s underground. And you can kinda see if I pan around, you know, it show… It’s visualizing under… Underneath the surface, but it’s still showing up just because, you know, to have that context. But there’s this button here where you can actually turn it off. So, you know, basically, any underground feature in any of your designs, if they’re, you know, underneath the the actual surface, using this toggle would turn that on and off. Because, obviously, you know, being able to see them, you know, they’re buried is still very helpful. But, you know, you have that option.
So there are a few few things there are a few things that you can do that are pretty neat here with the mobile app. So, you know, let’s say, you know, you wanna take a measurement, see a cross section, see, you know, how much cut you need to reach, you know, the the top of the pipe or, you know, basically how deep the pipe is. So I could go in here and, you know, click this tool… These… The tools button here, Click the line.
And from here, you know, you click the add point, you know, where you wanna start it. So we’ll just start it right here. Click add point.
Move it down, and then you’ll drag it across.
That point again.
You’ll click view view measurement, and so it’ll show you the slope distance, horizontal distance, train distance of the line itself.
But what’s really neat here is you can view the cross section, and this is where you can actually view everything, you know, in a in a different light, I guess. So it’ll take a second to load, but so we’ll let that do that. Let that cook for a minute.
We have the QA section at the end, but if if if any pop… Or any questions pop up while we’re running through this, feel free or… To share them over, and I’ll make sure that we get to all of them at the end.
Perfect. Thanks, Chelsea.
So… Yeah. So with this cross section, what we’re viewing here is the elevation. So this yellow line is the current survey.
If I pull this up, it’ll be easier to see kinda… I’m not sure if it’s getting cut out or not.
Yeah.
But then we also have the design file already included, but I could add in, you know, another survey as well. So let’s say we wanna make sure, you know, this grade… Because you can change this from elevation to the grade and, you know, ratio degrees, whatever.
We wanna make sure that the two surfaces are, you know, matching each other to make… Just to verify that, you know, there’s accuracy in the survey, that the the surfaces haven’t changed, there wasn’t any unnecessary work.
You can check that to make sure, you know, in areas that there are no changes by using this cross section.
On the flip side too, you can look and see… You know, it’ll show you, you know, as you toggle along, you know, drag this across, you can see exactly how deep that first pipe is and that second pipe is. So, again, it’s just a way to get context without having to do any unnecessary work. It’s just a quick and easy way to verify, certain things, making sure that you’re, you know, following the the design plan, everything like that.
So I can click out of here. And, again, here too…
Let me just pull out of that as well. What we should see…
Yeah. So if you…
Even without the line up here in this bar at the very top of your screen, you’ll see your real time position, your northing and easting. You’ll also see this. This is the design you have on. And so when you hover this crosshair over the pipe, you know, whatever location it is, it’ll actually show you how much earth you need need to remove to reach the top of that pipe.
So, again, it’s, you know, pretty neat, gives you a lot of context.
And, yeah.
The last thing I’m gonna show in this, on this, site is a quick stockpile measurement. So in a lot of times, people in the field, you know, the big thing that they’re doing, you know, end… You know, at the end of the month or beginning is doing end of month quantities and whatnot.
And, you know, maybe it’s the end of the day and you need to load out… Load off, you know, a certain amount of material. You know, a lot of people might have to go back into office and check, you know, what the quantity was for a stockpile, something like that.
But with mobile app, you know, again, you can eliminate that communication with somebody else who’s far away who… Or who’s not on-site, and you can actually go in and get a quantity really quick, know, on your own right there. So, you know, zoom in here. We have a stockpile and say, you know, we needed to get a quick, volume measurement of what’s going on here. So, again, going into the tools, I can just click the polygon button.
Well, actually, first, one thing I wanna show… I’m gonna click out of here.
As you know, the survey clearly, you can tell by the shadows, was done probably in the afternoon, so the lighting conditions aren’t exactly optimal to find the toe of the stockpile. So there are other layers you can turn on in this survey to help you draw this polygon to measure this volume. So if I click here, I can scroll down.
And where is it? And turn on the contour lines.
I’ll make it, you know, this teal color so it’s very obvious where it is. Make it thicker it’s pretty clear. Let that cook.
There we go. So now, you know, again, in the desktop, there is a feature where you can turn on a gradient map, and it’s very clear.
But here, you know, again, this is another tool in the mobile app that can help out with this.
It’s pretty… You know, makes it a lot clearer where where this toe is. And so, you know, go back into the tools, click polygon, and you just click around it with your… So you tap your finger, but you just do a quick, you know, taps, making all these vertices around the toe.
I’ll try this quick.
Again, kinda following the contour line there, especially, like, in that shadowed area will help out.
But, yeah, you’re just kinda clicking around. You can pan around as well and zoom in to make it, you know, even closer.
There we go. That was a rough…
Quick quick rough sketch, basically, of it. But then you can get your your cut, net, and fill. And by default, it does it with the smart volume surface. So what this measurement is saying here…
And, again, you know, you’re someone out in the field who needs just a really quick volume of, you know, this material here. So what we’ve done is each vertex that I put in with my finger, you know, each little tap I did, all of the elevations from each of those points creates an interpolated base that is, you know, used for this stockpile. And so what we’re seeing is basically 23.8 cubic yards of cut would need to be performed to reach, you know, that interpolated base.
So, basically, the cut is going to be your volume here.
So, again, quick way to get a quick quantity without having to ask somebody, you know, somewhere else to measure it for you, pull somebody in, somebody to have to go and hand topo it themselves. Like, this is just a quick and easy get the quantity figured out. Bing bang boom, move on. So I’m gonna stop sharing here.
And I’m gonna keep on going with the… This… These examples on a different, a different site.
Let’s see. There we go.
Cool. So this is our subdivision build site.
And here, you know, there are a few thing… Few more things that you can do. You know, Say you’re a field supervisor field supervisor and you need to spot check an elevation against a design or figure out how close, you know, an area is to grade. So, again, like I showed earlier, you can click into the designs here, you know, find your different phases. So I can look at, you know, our finish grade for phase four, turn that on.
I’ll let that go. And then down here is that design. And so you’ll see up here, wherever this crosshair is, it’s gonna update and tell you exactly, you know, how much fill or cut needs to be performed to reach, you know, that… This finished grade surface.
So I could even go in and do a quick point measurement and do a spot elevation. Again, it’s gonna show the designs or the current surveys elevation at this crosshair.
And this will take a second to load, but then it’ll also show you the finished grade design, elevation. So, again, quick way to check, you know, how you’re doing, the progress that you’ve made, to reach, that final grade or even subgrade, depending on where you are in the lifespan of the project.
There’s another way you could even do this as well. So you could go in and I could… Let’s see. I’ll turn off the design for now.
Let’s turn that off. Let’s say I wanted to do a cut fill within this area. The area of interest is this central region that’s within that design. You know? Because out here, these are all, you know, properties. So these are different parcels and whatnot. But let’s say this is, you know, like a catchment area or what have you.
You can go and click the tools again, do polygon measurement, and I could click around it kinda like I did earlier. And, again, I’m saying click, but if you’re out in the field, you’d be doing this with your finger.
Just to kinda get a quick sense of where you are, you know, at the end of the day or, you know, at the end of… You know, after the survey has been done, you can click view polygon.
We’ll change the… Change this. So this is where you’ll change your surface.
So I could select different designs, but here, we wanna see how it looks compared to the finished grade.
So we’ll do that. Select that one. And this gives us a cut fill map, you know, comparing this most recent survey to that finished grade design. So, again, quick ways to do measurements where you can just do it, you know, right there while you’re looking at it. You have the context. Something doesn’t look right, do a quick measurement without having to pull somebody else in.
Yeah.
So… Okay.
Moving on here.
I go back to sharing that PowerPoint.
So…
Yeah. So next, talking about the actual communication between office and field.
What I kinda showed you are ways that will, I guess, limit the amount of communication you need to do between the office and the field.
But there are also ways to, you know, make the communication a lot more efficient. So capturing the photos and adding comments and tagging folks, media, three sixty walk throughs, which is a new feature that we recently released where you can go and walk through your site and with your… Holding up your camera.
And it’ll basically take… You know, I pretty much compare it to, like, the Google Google Maps street view, where if you drag that little fella in the corner onto the street, you can look around, you can click the arrows, and you can move through your site. So, again, this is a way where someone in the field can do this three sixty walk through, and it’ll show you… Give you more context for for things that the drone can’t capture, seeing in in, like, a first person point of view how your progress is tracking for the project.
Anybody in the office can view that without having to travel, say, three hours to the site.
So you can pin locations with the images.
You can add annotations, show detours, anything anything of that nature. And it goes both ways too. And I think…
I I might have mentioned this example earlier. But say you have a a a road closure. You know, maybe you’re resurfacing a haul road or you’re checking if a haul is to the standard or you’re resurfacing a road in the subdivision or making some repairs, installing manhole cover, what have you. Whatever reason that a road, an access road might be closed, instead of having to go on-site, give a debrief to everybody and say, hey.
Listen. You know, we’re gonna have to close this. This is the plan, blah blah blah. You know, the person who’s making these decisions in the office could go and draw a route in the, you know, in in the desktop that will show, you know, the detour and the direction they need to go and even add an annotation saying, this road’s closed.
Do this, you know, do this route. And those measurements that they make in the desktop can be organized in a way. Know, You you could have a folder for those reroutes or, you know, road closures or just things for the field supervisor to be aware of.
And then, you know, everybody in the field who has mobile app can access that access it, will be aware of it, and it just decreases the amount of effort, time, energy, money spent, you know, having to go and do this… Those sorts of things in person.
So, again, going back to those demo sites, when I go back to the subdivision build…
I think that was the one. Yep.
So, okay, click out of that. So just… There’s less noise. If I click this home button, this will just show me the default site view.
We’re going into this measurement tab.
You know, if I scroll it up, I have all these different, you know, folders. So all these measurements are organized. And I know this is very messy because it’s a demo site. A lot of people have done it. But, you know, for your own data, you know, it probably won’t look like this.
But over here, I believe it’s in this one. Yeah. So in the annotations, I made quick draw, and it was just called Route 101. So let’s say October 1, there was that road closure, and you needed to communicate that with everybody in the field as quickly as possible.
You could have them turn it on. And when they go and look at it, they’ll see this line, and there’s an arrow at the end. So let’s say, typically, they’re taking this road over here.
I don’t know if you all are seeing my cursor or not. But you know, this… That road to the north… Northeast that makes a a bend south, say that’s closed for whatever reason, maybe there’s resurfacing. You know, you can draw this line and just to, you know, communicate where that detour is gonna be.
Let’s say, you know, you wanna label label it as well. So I could go in…
Or let… Let’s say you’re… Maybe not for this example, but, you know, maybe there’s something you wanna check, you know, making sure, you know, something is installed properly or catchment area looks, you know, looks accurate. You could go and add an annotation here, click it in, click on it, or click continue.
Sorry. My screen’s kinda kinda closed here, so I can’t really see where it is. Either way. Okay. There we go.
So you can name it, you know, whatever. So, you know, check, you know, check if this is correct. Check if this, you know, looks to standard. You know? Anything, you know, that you want someone to be aware of, you can add add that, and it’ll pop up. You can save it to, you know, a folder. It’ll show the information on it, and, you know, it’s just a way to, you know, make something very obvious and point it out to folks.
I think to me that’s the most powerful, though, is the photo. And, again, since I’m not in the field, you know, this is gonna be not what… It’s not gonna look exactly, what it looks like.
But, you know, let’s say, there’s a pothole that needs to be filled.
I could go walk right up to the pothole, click this photo icon here.
Not sure if you all are seeing this, but it’s asking me to upload from my photos from my desktop because, again, I’m not using my phone.
But, essentially, what happens… Here, I’ll just do a random screenshot I did. So let’s say I wanna upload this this photo. So let’s pretend that this image from a different site was a pothole that needs to be filled. I could go upload that, place it on the map somewhere, add a category, safety, utility, whatever, place it on the map, upload the site.
And then down here in your bottom, you know, this is where you can kinda drag. It’s like a little navigator. But I can go to this media tab here, pull it up, and we’ll scroll down.
And right now, it’s uploading. And just for the sake of time, I I did this earlier, so I’ll just click on this one.
So you can click on it or you can click this eyeball, and it will pop up where that image was taken. So if you’re in the field, it’ll just pin right to where you’re standing. But say you took a picture and you uploaded it later on and you’re not in the field, you can still adjust where it shows up.
Again, the nice thing is when you’re in the field, it’ll just go right there.
But it’ll pop up there, but then I can go and actually click on it, pulls up the image. And then down here, there’s a comment section, and that’s where I could, you know, at somebody. So I could, you know, put in the email of whoever’s responsible for filling in that pothole, handling these safety hazards, and it’ll give them a notification right to their email. And again, it just makes the communicating these sorts of things a lot more efficient and a lot easier too.
And so, you know, other things you can do with media as well, like, you can view other images that were done here as well.
The one last thing I wanted to show really quick is the walk throughs. So, again, you know, without having to have someone come out on-site, you know, they can go. You can use the mobile app to do the walk through.
There we go. And, you know, they can, from the office, you know, get this first person context, use this arrow, and, you know, pin through and see what’s going on around their site, you know, look at the progress as if they were right there. So it really helps, again, saving time, money, time spent traveling, all of that, especially when you’ve got scattered. It’s a great way to just get that added context.
And that’s kind of been the theme of this whole presentation that I’m been talking really fast through anyways. It’s just, you know, the context context is everything. Location is everything. And having all your data in a centralized repository where you can access it from any location really just helps everybody involved on a project.
So I’m checking my notes here, but I think that’s all I wanted to show in terms of the demo side of it. So I’ll go ahead and get back to the PowerPoint here.
Yeah. So done there.
Yeah. So, again, kind of what I’ve been harping on for the last half hour, communication can be fragmented.
Whether… Whatever avenue that you’re doing with your communication can be… Can cause delays, communication issues, confusion.
And with the Propeller desktop and mobile app, that communication between the field and office, you know, is a lot easier. And that’s what we’re trying to do there. We’re trying to close that gap. You know, survey data, designs, measurements, photos, notes, markups, they’re all tied to the same map, and everybody who’s involved in the project can see it.
Yeah. I I think I think the gist has been covered at this point. So if anybody wants to ask any questions, feel free.
