Mobile GIS | Benefits, Use Cases, & Implementation

Why Mobile GIS Matters: Example Use Cases

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Remember, GIS data represents detailed information about the physical world.

The value of GIS may span many sectors, but it’s most critical to operations that cover large geographic areas: bridge construction, water quality sampling across a city, repair to a downed utility pole, assessment of miles of natural gas pipeline, and much, much more.

This is where Mobile GIS comes in. In each of the examples we listed, field teams are out in the real world completing inspections, accessing asset information, and documenting work. 

The field needs easy-to-use GIS that works wherever their assignment takes them.

Let’s take a look at a few representative use cases.

Utilities (Natural Gas, Electric, & Water)

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GIS is common at most medium to large utilities because their business is the built world.

Look out your window and you’ll likely see power lines, sewer grates, or a natural gas meter - signs of a complex network of infrastructure that keeps your neighborhood alive.

Utilities need extensive field operations to monitor and maintain these services, and Mobile GIS is playing an increasingly important role in this work.

We’ll narrow our focus to four key programs.

1. Inspecting natural gas lines & preventing explosions

Natural gas lines supply millions of homes with critical energy. It’s a priority for these utilities to avoid natural gas explosions - a risk posed by “cross bores.”

Cross bores occur when a natural gas line is unknowingly drilled through existing underground infrastructure. For instance, a natural gas line leading to a home could be drilled through a sewer pipe. If a field worker cleared out the sewer pipe because of a blockage, they’d hit the gas line and potentially cause an explosion.

This is a direct threat to public safety: There have been 18 known cross-bore-related explosions on record.

Utilities are tasked with inspecting miles upon miles of gas lines, and coordinating the replacement of any identified cross bores - a massive endeavor.

Mobile GIS can expedite these inspections - and ultimately shorten the timelines of these programs - by equipping a field worker with the situational awareness and data collection tools they need in the palm of their hand.

Traditionally, these inspections were completed on paper. A field crew would arrive at an address, run a camera down a sewer line looking for cross bores, spray paint lines on the road to indicate the location of pipes, and document everything on paper cards.

Unfortunately, this process was slow, data fell between the cracks, and after spending hours manually inputting this information into a GIS in the office, utilities often couldn’t trust the imprecise and patchy records.

Today, a field worker can use their phone’s GPS or a handheld data collector to record the locations of everything they find. Not only does this improve accuracy, but it’s instantly available to the office, which can jumpstart the replacement process if a cross bore is found.

Then, an installation crew can arrive on scene, see the location of relevant underground pipes, and get to work fast - without taking out a walk-wheel and spray paint, and re-doing all of their colleagues’ location work.

In short, Mobile GIS streamlines work that keeps communities safe. We see the same value in Mobile GIS with electric utilities who are facing mounting threats from extreme weather.

‍Interested in the role of Mobile GIS in preventing natural gas explosions? Check out Why Mobile GIS is Critical in Cross Bore Detection and Mitigation.

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2. Protecting power lines & mitigating wildfire risk

We’ve all experienced it. The lights go out, you try flipping the switch, and nothing happens. There’s been a power outage.

While losing power is a common experience, most people are unfamiliar with the actual power restoration process and what utilities do to prevent outages in the first place.

For instance, utilities maintain vegetation management programs, where they monitor the foliage near power lines and remove any dead, dying, or overgrown vegetation that poses a threat. This vegetation could fall on the line in the event of a storm or even start a wildfire during dry conditions.

The only problem: Utilities maintain thousands of miles of distribution and transmission lines.

To manage these inspections efficiently, utilities need two things: 1) Easy-to-use data collection tools and situational awareness that teams can leverage in the field, and 2) a mixed dataset that overlays satellite imagery, drone orthomosaics, LiDAR, and other innovative technologies to monitor large geographic areas.

Mobile GIS can do both by dissolving siloes, integrating intelligent geospatial data, and connecting field devices.

See how in Unearth’s blog How Mobile GIS Streamlines Vegetation Management.

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3. Emergency response & power restoration

Of course, utilities are not only concerned with prevention - they must respond to emergencies as well.

Here, too, Mobile GIS provides value.

For example, a utility must assess the damage to its infrastructure following a tropical storm or wildfire to assign crews, organize resources, and understand when it’s safe to turn the power back on.

The faster a utility can complete this damage assessment, the faster it can get the power restored. This can be a matter of life and death for customers who depend on power for medical devices or temperature control.

Instead of relying on paper or radios while driving through neighborhoods, assessors can use Mobile GIS to quickly photograph downed lines, blocked roads, and other damage points - pinning them to a real-time map. This method is faster and more accurate, and avoids duplicate data entry.

Ultimately, a utility’s command center can trade whiteboards, crowded email chains, and the endless buzz of text messages for Mobile GIS, a single source of field truth and communication on an easily digestible map.

Explore the challenge of extreme weather and the role that Mobile GIS has to play in The Urgent Case for Mobile GIS in Utility Storm Response.

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4. Replacing water lines & limiting lead exposure

We’ve covered how electric and natural gas utilities are using Mobile GIS to streamline field work and protect the communities they serve - but there’s another important type of infrastructure that’s top of mind in the news: water.

Water arrives at homes through service lines that connect to the water main running down a neighborhood street. With the crisis in Flint, Michigan, there’s a spotlight on the fact that there’s an estimated 6 to 10 million service lines that are made of lead.

There’s no safe lead level for children, and yet millions of Americans are drinking water contaminated with it.

Recent regulation, funding, and initiatives are designed to get this lead out of communities. But first, water systems need to figure out exactly where all of these lead services lines are located. 

Since many lead lines are located on the customer side of the property, water systems don’t have records of them. The first step in getting the lead out of communities is building an inventory of all lead service lines. This effort requires boots on the ground.

Mobile GIS provides the perfect platform to build an inventory considering the number of stakeholders involved. Water systems will rely on field teams, office employees, contractors, non-profit organizations, other municipal programs, and more to collect the data they need. It’s a community effort. And Mobile GIS is defined by its accessibility.

Water systems using Mobile GIS can add stakeholders from across the clean water ecosystem to knock on doors, test pipe material in customer homes, dig up service lines, and sort through historical records - all of this information centralized in one intuitive place.

For more on Mobile GIS’s role in clean water, check out Lead Service Line Inventories: Everything You Need to Know.

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Construction

While GIS is a critical technology for asset owners like utilities, it’s still gaining traction in construction. However, a recent report suggests it’s on the rise in the industry, and contractors will lose their competitive edge without the technology.

Notably, 40% of the contractors surveyed used GIS in more than half of their projects to collect data on site and to provide digital asset information at the end of construction.

By turning over GIS data, contractors make it easy for owners to import asset information into their system of record and access key data during ongoing operations and maintenance.

But it’s not just about project handover.

Mobile GIS provides a more intuitive way to visualize a construction project, especially when it spans across a large area. Instead of storing data in folders, lists, emails, and texts, contractors can see everything on a real-time map. At the end of the day, it just makes more sense to look at a map when you’re navigating the real world.

It’s true many contractors turn to Google Earth to map project data, but Google Earth isn’t built with construction in mind and entails clunky workflows. We’ve found there aren’t many tools actually designed for large infrastructure projects - a perfect opportunity for Mobile GIS.

In a recent report, we identified 5 ways digital maps can save contractors time on their projects:

1. Progress tracking

2. Project updates

3. Digital as-builts

4. Advanced work packaging

5. Dispute resolution

Despite these benefits, contractors often dismiss GIS as too complex, so there’s significant potential for Mobile GIS to get traction with teams who’d never consider adopting a complicated GIS system. 

In the construction industry? In our blogs, we’ve also explored how construction mapping software increases profit margins and examined three ways Mobile GIS simplifies construction project management.

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Mobile GIS revolutionizes field data collection across sectors

We’ve discussed the value of Mobile GIS to utilities, emergency response operations, and construction, but there are truly endless applications for the technology. The need for simple yet powerful field data collection tools spans entire sectors.

A data specialist at Unearth illustrated this point recently in an interview reflecting on her career before joining our team.

At one point, she worked as a biological technician for the National Park Service at Mt. Rainier, and hiked to remote lakes, paddled out in a raft, and took environmental measurements with pen and paper. She’d then carry this paper to headquarters and someone would manually input everything into online records.

There’s a consistent theme across construction, utilities, and even the National Park Service: manual data collection and transfer.

Whatever your career, it’s likely there’s a program or workflow that could benefit from Mobile GIS. And with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the immediate benefits and implementation of Mobile GIS in the field.