The Fulcrum Focus

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.

Recent snowstorms managed to cripple the second largest state in the continental United States. Overnight, millions were left without essential services due to aging infrastructure and unprepared electrical grid’s vulnerability to severe storms. Unfortunately, with extreme weather conditions becoming increasingly common around the world, being proactive about how to respond to such disasters in the future could save time, money, resources, and most importantly, lives.

(If you’re the type of person who wants to jump straight to the doc, go for it.)

From the beginning of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, the way that many organizations do business changed dramatically, seemingly overnight. Remote work became the norm as offices went dark, and people learned that many tasks could be completed with little (or no) face-to-face interaction. The cloud technology that has enabled this transformation has made many things possible that previous generations couldn’t have dreamed of — not just for traditional office workers, but for the mobile teams who don’t do their jobs behind a desk and who still report to job sites every day. It facilitates a seamless transfer of data, without the need to be in the same location, reducing costs while increasing safety and productivity.

Today marks the first phase of a new, easier way to integrate Fulcrum and Esri™. Joint customers can now get more value from their existing Esri investments by extending their location intelligence capabilities beyond the specialized geographic information systems (GIS) user.

The Coronavirus pandemic caught almost everyone off guard in 2020. Some organizations swiftly embraced new technology, enabling their workforce to transition smoothly to working from home. However, others found it challenging to adjust to this new reality and maintain a healthy cash flow.

The construction industry faces a tight labor market and a shortage of skilled workers. This situation often forces companies to fill roles with workers who do not meet the ideal employee profile. They do this out of desperation to complete projects on time and within budget.

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.

Everything about 2020 was strange. The way we worked, shopped, socialized, and learned was upended seemingly overnight. Most of us have since adapted (out of necessity). Tools like Zoom and Google have helped us work and learn from home. However, a significant group of workers faced unique challenges. They were vital for maintaining operations but couldn’t work from home. These workers had to adapt to new ways of working and find tools to perform their tasks effectively.

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.

It’s the end of the fourth quarter, which means business leaders everywhere are planning their goals for the new year.

Organizations that continually increase efficiency, safety, and customer satisfaction all have this in common: They embrace Field process improvement.

Construction is one of the most heavily regulated industries because of its inherent risks. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), one of every 5 workplace fatalities occurs on construction developments. Because they’re often working at height or with heavy machinery, construction workers must be diligent about following strict safety protocols to avoid injuring themselves, their co-workers, or passersby. The best way to ensure those protocols are followed? Use a construction checklist.‍

Businesses are embracing no-code development for its many benefits: It costs less than traditional software development, it increases their agility and productivity, and it takes strain off of their IT departments by enabling non-developers to create and quickly modify custom apps.

Few things are more frustrating than being held up by technical problems. The laptop freezes. The vending machine breaks. The car doesn’t start. Knowing that your immediate future is now dependent on someone else — the IT guy, the repair tech, the auto mechanic — is such a helpless feeling. Like being stuck in limbo. The good news is that technical problems are not inevitable. In fact, many are fairly easily avoided. Because almost every technical problem is really, at its core, a human one.

When was the last time you went grocery shopping without a checklist? How soon after did you have to go back for something you forgot? Checklists play an important role in our lives, not just by reminding us to buy milk. Health and safety checklists, for example, can prevent accidents, illnesses, and injuries.

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?). 

No code app development platforms are exploding in popularity, and with good reason.

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.

Establishing a quality culture within your mobile workforce is more important than ever.

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.

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.

When it comes to quality, people tend to notice when things go wrong rather than when they’re going right.

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

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:

New Fulcrum Workflow Capability
The Fulcrum team was super excited to introduce the Workflows capability this week, and we can’t wait to hear about the different ways our customers use it!

This is part 1 in a series about Fulcrum spreadsheets, data, and visualization. In this part, we’ll cover the basics of spreadsheet applications and an introduction to selecting dataviz methods. Be sure to also check out part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of the series.

This is part 2 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover using Google Sheets with Fulcrum. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of the series.

One of our favorite mobile mapping apps is Locus Map, a “utility belt” mapping app for Android that’s feature-packed and robust for all sorts of outdoor and recreational mapping needs. It lets you load offline trail maps, record GPS tracks, drop waypoints, and more.

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.

How did you come up with the idea for Fulcrum? I get asked this, or a version of this question a lot, and we typically include an abbreviated version of the story when we do corporate capability briefings for new prospective customers. I’ve been asked enough times recently that I realized I should probably put it down in writing, because there are likely people at Spatial Networks that don’t even fully understand the history of Fulcrum’s origins.

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.

I would like to start off by thanking the countless users that have been emailing us their feature requests. While we have always planned on adding a lot of the features that users have requested, there have been a lot of feature requests that we have not thought of. It is really interesting to hear how all of you are using Fulcrum for data collection. With a product that is so moldable to the user, we never could have imagined all of the possible use cases. A recent update brought two features that have been requested by a lot of users; an enhanced export tool and a record status tracking field. We hope that our users are happy with these new enhancements and gladly welcome any feedback regarding their functionality.

No network – no problem! Using maps when offline in Fulcrum
Today we added a much anticipated feature to our Android client that now allows users to save time and bandwidth. Previously in order to utilize true offline maps on Android, each map would have to be uploaded to your account, and then downloaded back down to each device. This presents challenges for users with limited to zero Internet connectivity.

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.

Auto-populate your address fields

As you may or may not know, one of the best features of Fulcrum is the drag and drop form builder. Recently, we added support for a new type of field that many users have asked for: address fields with reverse geocoding.

Despite enormous industry investment in safety, construction work continues to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

We on the Fulcrum team are very pleased to announce a brand-new Report Builder that dramatically enhances your ability to create and deliver professional, error-free reports to your internal or external constituents.

Construction Tech Review Magazine, a leading peer-to-peer resource for information and insights from the construction industry, has recognized Fulcrum as a Top Provider of Safety and Compliance Solutions!

Employers have a long list of things to think about as they resume operations after the COVID-19 closures, such as keeping their employees safe, creating a plan to ensure continued compliance with government regulations, and how to respond if an employee tests positive for COVID-19. To help in these efforts, Coleman McCormick, Fulcrum’s VP of Product co-hosted a webinar last week with Flo Broderick of CARTO about how businesses can leverage spatial analysis for risk mitigation as they reopen.

As the country reopens, corporate liability in post-COVID world comes into focus

The family of a Walmart employee who died due to complications of COVID-19 filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the company last month.

Deploy digital cleaning & sanitization checklists at scale to protect workers

The COVID-19 epidemic highlights the importance of a data-driven approach. From an epidemiological view, limited test data restricts our understanding of the spread and future trajectory. Often, even available data is hard to analyze and present in a form useful for public and policymaker decisions.

As a technology company, focused on building software, we consider ourselves to be in a fortunate position during this global pandemic. With one-third of our workforce already working remotely, we are well-positioned to continue operations with minimal disruption.

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.

The foundation of any family is centered around the home. It’s the place we live, eat, sleep, and grow through many of life’s changes. Most of us make our home purchases based on neighborhood safety, convenience, education and economic opportunity.

The days of filling out forms using pen and paper and then transcribing that information into a database for use later have come to an end. If you are still using that workflow, you have probably landed here because you’re looking for a better way.