Successful delivery of a project is often front-loaded.
Failure to understand unique project site challenges and to engage critical team members on solutions to them can often lead to unnecessary costs and project delays. Desktop Scouting is all about arming your teams with spatial knowledge and advice to understand their project site better in order to make the best possible planning decisions.
Difficult terrain, watercourse crossings, landowner and stakeholder concerns, environmental, and regulatory requirements must all be considered and addressed. Challenger Geomatics has developed innovative tools to visualize actual ground conditions with minimal field time, supporting your team to assess routes and alignments for pipelines and access roads, and locations for well pads and other sites.
This approach emphasizes collaboration. Desktop Scouting meetings bring together remote teams including subject matter experts in engineering, operations, environmental, regulatory, and any other relevant stakeholders. Visualizing local conditions and leveraging Challenger’s extensive knowledge in survey and right-of-way considerations allows your teams to optimize facilities layout, access points, and pipeline entries. This approach can assist to:
- Accurately forecast costs
- Reduce expensive change orders
- Capture stakeholder input early
- Mitigate risks to project schedule
Desktop Scouting also integrates other technologies including aerial orthophotography, surveying drones, satellite imagery, and our own internal 3D Scout Tool and PlanworX GIS Platform. These tools enable us to provide clients with the right data to support decision-making. The result? Designers can select their optimal location and plot out their site from the comfort of their home office and planning can proceed without the need to have boots on the ground.
It’s the next best thing to being there.
In Challenger’s experience, once our clients use Desktop Scouting as part of their planning process, they immediately realize the value and continue to rely on it to support their projects: “In real-time, we use our geomatics expertise, extensive industry experience, and visualization tools to support our clients in working through the many considerations involved in selecting well pad locations, optimizing alignment of pipelines and access roads and addressing other design challenges,” says Richard Deis, ALS, P.Eng., one of Challenger’s Desktop Scouting experts. “Our clients have told us of many instances that it’s helped them achieve significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.”
Being able to visualize the local topography in 3D and the infrastructure already in place helps teams to be on the same page for important planning decisions. Engaging early with subject matter experts and key stakeholders allows teams to incorporate their feedback into the design without the added expense of heli-scouting, site visits and ground truthing.
Caption: Proposed pad footprint superimposed on bare earth LiDAR, including facilities layout.
Scouting a route or a site can often be done with existing data in order to minimize field time and travel related expenses. Identifying and addressing site challenges early can also prevent costly change orders further down the road.
We know that budgets are tight early on in a project, and we work with our clients to provide cost-effective solutions to meet the unique needs of their projects. If survey data needs to be collected, high resolution topographic data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help to efficiently identify challenges and establish the feasibility of a site without the need for extensive field work.
Software features have been added to our proprietary in-house applications to meet the specific needs of our clients, such as being able to measure and calculate volumes for earthworks projects within our 3D Scout program. For sub-contractors, knowing approximately how much dirt needs to be moved for the construction of a pad site allows them to bid the project with greater accuracy, creating efficiencies in the procurement process.
Each project and its team are unique, and we work closely with clients to match their needs with the right geomatics solution. To plan your project more efficiently up front, contact us for a customized demo.
