Esri Community Member Spotlight: Matt Edrich
This series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to model how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
Watch Matt's video interview in Kaltura
Maintenance and Conditioning Reporting with FieldSync
Cell towers have a way of announcing themselves against the natural landscape. They shoot upwards among rolling hills and evergreens, catching one’s eye in the midst of a picturesque drive. In the twilight, flashing beacons at their crown warn low-flying aircraft of their otherwise retreating presence. The average cell phone tower rises between 50 and 200 feet (15.2 – 60.96m) off the ground, with some soaring hundreds of feet higher. Upon sight, who hasn’t at one time or another indulged the adventurous muse: ‘Would I have the guts to harness up and climb one of those if it were my job?’
Matt Edrich (@MattEdrich) has. He’s the Product Manager for FieldSync, a data acquisition and analytics technology company changing the way that the telecommunications industry understands and maintains structural assets. And while the wind-whipping experience of inspecting towers from bottom to top has been a cherished part of the job, most of Matt’s work revolves around developing a next generation of tools and workflows for others to use while gathering streams of field data.
Matt Edrich climbing a cell tower as seen through a rangefinder.
“At FieldSync, we're doing a lot of maintenance and conditioning reporting on telecom assets, mapping out cell phone towers for engineering purposes, and then sourcing parts to maintain all that infrastructure,” Matt describes.
Given the size of cell tower sites and the amount of information that needs gathering, traditional maintenance and conditioning reporting can easily take a team between 4-6 hours of climbing, scribbling notes, and taking photos. That combined with the up-to several hours of travel time between towers can mean completing more than one site a day is often not in the cards. That is, without better methods being introduced by Matt and FieldSync.
Transforming Telecom’s Data
Using a combination of devices running ArcGIS Survey123 forms in the field and drone capture, Matt has pieced together a workflow that can cut down the time it takes to complete site reporting by about 75%.
“What I was able to piece together with combined help of Esri Community, the Esri Documentation, and the drone aspect of our work was figuring out how to create one ArcGIS Survey123 survey running from the office that’s talking to surveys in the field that are pulling in data captured with a drone instead of climbers. Using this process, I was able to complete a 500-foot-tall tower in like 90 minutes, which is unheard of. That kind of efficiency gain is not at all possible in the industry.”
“ We consistently hear from our customers that we're changing what their expectations are for data on their towers, which is entirely possible because of ArcGIS Survey123. And the things you can do with ArcGIS Survey123, at least for us, were unlocked by Esri Community. ”
The vastly reduced time to complete site reporting is just one of the benefits of FieldSync services. Clients opting for climber-powered reporting over drone enhanced services are still awakening to efficiencies and a degree of informed decision-making that were previously out of reach.
Matt shared, “You can have your data talk to itself and inform what your field technicians are doing and what they should do in the next 5 minutes because of what was done last month, which is not a thing in this little sector of telecom right now.”
“We consistently hear from our customers that we're changing what their expectations are for data on their towers, which is entirely possible because of ArcGIS Survey123. And the things you can do with ArcGIS Survey123, at least for us, were unlocked by Esri Community.”
Finding Support and Camaraderie in Community
During the few years Matt has been involved in Esri Community, he has come to rely on the group-powered resource for a variety needs.
“Almost everything I do right now is in ArcGIS Survey123. I’m looking in Esri Community to see if I'm doing things the best or the most controllable way.”
Matt takes pleasure in an affirming camaraderie he feels when discovering he’s not the only user trying to solve a particular challenge or who is tracking down a piece of information in Esri’s expansive product documentation. He finds that oftentimes another user will have done the legwork of locating some needed information or of solving a sticky issue and shared their findings in Esri Community, saving him significant work.
“… you learn the most by engaging with your peers and being honest about what you've tried and where your shortcomings are. ”
There are times, too, when figures in Esri Community whom Matt has come to see as trailblazers illuminate the borders of what’s immediately possible with the Esri technology he’s using. People like Esri Community MVP, Doug Browning (@DougBrowning), who push the limits of what’s possible.
“You kind of realize you're at the edge of a sandbox. It's like, oh, wow, OK … maybe we can refine what we have now and consider other Esri products that can support this capacity or find workarounds that are not in this particular ArcGIS Survey123 software.” Those moments inform a sense of pride in how much he has been able to achieve and inspire Matt to advocate for new capabilities through the ArcGIS Ideas Exchange.
His time in Esri Community has led Matt to warmly recommend involvement to others.
“Just do it. As simple as that is to say, you learn the most by engaging with your peers and being honest about what you've tried and where your shortcomings are. I feel like a lot of people have this idea that like, they're going to get roasted because they don’t know the answer to some question. That's never been the case.”
“It can help you expand your critical thinking process for how to solve problems.”
Matt Edrich is Product Manager at FieldSync, a data acquisition and analytics technology company for telecommunications infrastructure. Matt uses Esri products to improve data collection. Through his work, in which he credits support from Esri Community, Matt has developed new processes that dramatically reduce typical site reporting times and introduce data visibility that support more informed decision making from stakeholders.