The Challenge
Dartmoor National Park comprises 368 square miles of open moorland, high tors, forest, farmland and river valleys in Devon. 34,000 people live and work within the park boundaries and it welcomes around 2.4 million visitors a year.
As the statutory body responsible for management of the park, DNPA have a responsibility to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area and have direct maintenance responsibility for a number of buildings, locations and associated fixed assets within the park boundaries.
In late 2017 Arcspeed started to work with Dartmoor National Park on a proof of concept / pilot project to measure the effectiveness of using mobile app technology to deal with managing the collection of field data and the management of assets across such a wide and geographically challenging area.
Project Approach
the following requirements were selected for the pilot project:
- Soil Erosion – Replacement of existing paper-based forms with a mobile app for use by Dartmoor Rangers to record the location, condition and extent of soil erosion sites within the park.
- Car Parks Maintenance – Migration of existing Access database to cloud-based web application and creation of mobile app to record results of car park inspections and to record the location, nature and priority of associated defects.
Adopting our agile project methodology, we first configured our Mobile Asset Management platform to meet the mobile elements of the above requirements.
We then used our java-based Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework to deliver a cloud-hosted web portal connected to an Azure SQL database. This allows back-office and management staff to have a real-time view of data collected in the field via summary dashboards, digital mapping and interactive data tables. The portal also provides APIs to allow data to be easily accessed by DNPA’s existing GIS platform and an online admin module to allow simple maintenance of the reference data used by the mobile apps.
After delivery and initial field-testing, the Arcspeed Mobile Asset Management platform was then extensively piloted by Dartmoor Rangers and maintenance staff over the course of a 3-month period.
Outcome
Following the success of the pilot project, Dartmoor National Park took the decision to move forward with the adoption of mobile technology as a key element to support the National Parks Management Plan.
In the subsequent competitive tender process, Arcspeed Digital Solutions Ltd were selected as the preferred supplier and awarded an initial 3-year contract to deliver our Mobile Asset Management solution to the park.
“Dartmoor National Park Authority is delighted to be working with Arcspeed to develop innovative solutions to capturing data associated with our asset management processes. The development of the apps provides us with a digital solution which has streamlined our processes for field data capture of assets, whilst the back office functionality is assisting with accurate forward planning and budget setting. The development and implementation of these digital solutions are improving efficiencies across the organisation.”
Andrew Watson, Head of Recreation, Access & Estates, Dartmoor National Park Authority
This live implementation comprised enhanced versions of the existing pilot apps for Soil Erosion Surveys and Car Park Inspections combined with a general asset / work management capability to allow the benefits of mobile working to be further extended to include the management of planned and reactive asset maintenance across the entirety of the DNPA property estate,
A project in 2019 further extended the Arcspeed footprint at DNPA to include the development of a dedicated app and management portal to support annual inspections of Rights of Way infrastructure across Dartmoor’s 500 mile network of footpaths, bridleways and byways. This system is now in use by a team of 50 volunteer wardens with the aim of completing a full path survey by the end of 2022. The information captured via our app is used to develop an in-depth insight into asset condition in order to allow planning of future investment and to ensure the safety and convenience of visitors to the Dartmoor National Park.
Visit our Mobile Asset Management product page to find out more about how our agile mobile forms solution can assist in field data collection and infrastructure asset management.