Webinar: Connecting People and Systems to Transform Field Operations.

[SarahPowell1]

We sincerely hope you enjoyed the webinar, Connecting People and Systems to Transform Field Operations, held on March 6, 2024. Please take time to watch and share the recording.  

This webinar explores how ArcGIS field apps unify field activities and enables staff to use real-time data for error reduction, productivity, and cost savings. See how to access purpose-built apps with a single user identity for connected or disconnected environments, deployed as SaaS or behind your firewall. 

For further information, please contact

• Brian Boulmay at bboulmay@esri.com
• Garrett Rimel at grimel@esri.com. 

Questions and Answers from Webinar

1. In seeing dashboards like this, it is great but there are also field staff that need to see this as well. How easily adaptable is it to mobile and is it clean looking on the device?
   1. There have been some exciting developments in this space. In the past you may have maintained two separate dashboards optimized for different screens – now you have the option to create a mobile dashboard view (read more).
2. There is a lot of bells and whistles, but curious what value Field Staff have found for this vs. office staff.
   1. During the webinar we tried to tell the office value story as well as the field value story as we believe they are interconnected. To be successful in production both user communities need to see value.
3. Maintenance of data, these seem important as there are a lot of touch points. How well does auditing work and is Oracle, MS SQL, or Postgres being used in the back end to store this data?
   1. This entire demo was done using Hosted data in AGOL. But all of these work flows could definitely be deployed in any the listed enterprise deployment. The keys to success for that will be in the schema planning to ensure we can link up all the data sets being collected.
4. Can the attached files be pre-loaded for off-line work? what about zones without connection?
   1. The documents if predownloaded could be taken offline in the field. How accessible the documents would be will depend on the method they are delivered. Example: the documents attached to the basemap features would be referenced to an outside data store. VS the attachments sent over via workforce would be elements embedded into the application and more offline enabled.
5. We are currently utilizing Power Automate for our Survey123 back end automations and have found it quite cumbersome to build out and requires regular debugging. Can these same back end automations be accomplished with FME? If so what would be the pros/cons of utilizing FME vs. PA?
   1. Both Power Automate and FME Server could be leveraged for the automations we had in the demo. Which platform you should go with depends on your IT infrastructure, available licenses, and specific connectors available on each platform that would support your workflow.
6. How much of the presented solutions can be accomplished with standard built in functions? ie. Widgets
   1. Everything we showed in the webinar was off the shelf configuration. There was no development or custom scripting beyond some very simple arcade for some color coding elements.
7. Would a solution like this require a team or would the workload be unmanageable to execute in a realistic amount of time without a team?
   1. The concept in the demo could be deployed by a single person or via a larger team. Once implemented many of the functions are automated or live connections – in theory reducing the amount of manual work required which should free up team members for other tasks. However as always, more users will most likely mean additional support requirements.
8. How are you tracking employees? Do they have a device on the employee badge for tracking?
   1. In the case of the demo, we were leveraging location sharing inside the Field Maps mobile app. While location sharing is on, their location is recorded whether they are using the app or it's running in the background, and tracks are collected if the device is online or offline.
9. For the asset location dashboard when you brought up the P&ID's and drawings, are those connected to a database to be pre-populated or is that something the supervisor would upload?
   1. These are usually stored as linked URLs in the dataset from some type of document management system, however they can also be stored inside the datasets. Many of the mobile tools also allow you to attach files on the fly during the data collection process.
10. Can those outside the organization (and no ESRI license) or those in a separate organization, submit forms or permits through Survey123?
    1. Third parties can certainly be given access to the surveys in several different ways. Partner collaboration would allow forms to be shared to another AGOL organization. You could assign them a named user in your organization with limited access to content. A non-licensed user would be more limited and for Survey123 they could only submit as an anonymous user if the Survey123 form was shared publicly.
11. How did you get all the dashboards to act as a single application?
    1. This was only configuration, using Experience Builder as a wrapper, each of the apps were presented in what feels like a single app interface to the user. This is easy to do and very beneficial when you need to group several related applications for a full system workflow.
12. Can you tell us more about how power automate integrates with Esri?
    1. Power automate offers a large number of out of the box connectors that will allow users to quickly establish connections to portal to read, write, and automatically watch field applications via web hooks. These tools are configurable out of the box, no code solutions and allow you to combine Esri functionality with the large number of extensions available in power automate.
13. Did you say geotriggers work offline?
    1. Geotriggers can now be cached to your device much in the same way maps are cached to enable off-line use. As long as you have a view of the sky and working GPS signal – the geotriggers will fire based on location.
14. How are you handling the real time data streams today?
    1. Velocity is the real time data ingestion and processing engine behind the scenes connecting to your live data streams, providing real time analytics and visualizations, and enabling many of the historical analytics you saw today as well. It is a crucial part of real time operations. But other products like Geoevent and many third party elements could also be leveraged.
15. How easy is it to deploy the mobile tools?
    1. If you are running enterprise in the cloud, mobile tools are easier to deploy. You can leverage mobile VPN connectivity tools to work with Enterprise on prem, or you leverage ArcGIS Online to run your mobile workflows and leverage collaboration to keep the data in sync with your enterprise system. The applications themselves are available in apple and android app stores for deployment to devices.
16. How does the licensing work for the mobile applications?
    1. Most of the mobile tools are included in the “Mobile Worker” user type and “GIS Professional” user type. This includes Field Maps, Survey123, Workforce and Quick Capture. These are identity based – so the same license can support many different mobile workflow solutions.

Warm regards,

The Esri Petroleum Team