Creating a Brighter Future with Accurate Data

As the pandemic continues to ebb and flow, AEC professionals are turning their focus from getting by to getting ahead and resuming innovative initiatives that can keep their organisation moving forward, even in the face of adversity.

A global car manufacturing company is revamping its facilities to one day house an all-electric vehicle plant.

It is being designed with a focus on sustainable manufacturing—a massive priority for engineering and reality capture teams within the company, which recognise that, when it comes to being eco-friendly, the devil is in the details. What good is a sustainable product if it’s part of a wasteful supply chain?

To cut costs and reduce carbon footprint, the company changed how it gathers site data across a large portfolio of manufacturing plants. Instead of strictly using helicopters to collect visuals, it now overlays LIDAR data from other sources with high-resolution Nearmap imagery, captured regularly across Australia, covering 90% of the population.

The supervisor of reality capture at the manufacturing company said that having all of that information and being able to go back to it and see how things were working became a huge benefit to the sustainable workplaces construction team.

When considering large-scale construction projects, high-quality imagery is absolutely essential to planning, designing and building the end product.

But gathering visuals is only part of a successful AEC mission.

Precise insight wins projects

Data is obviously central to each stage of the development lifecycle. But how confident are you in the quality of said data?

With proper vertical orthoimagery and 3D visualisation tools, you can accurately conduct scenario evaluations, determine cost estimates and detect change over time–and you can do so quickly and accurately.

Many AEC pros rely on historical data to understand the challenges a location may face at different times of year and how the landscape changes over time.

For example, property and facilities planning teams at a global company were always trying to discover where easements were located so they don’t build on top of them.

To avoid costly mistakes, they plot easement locations in Autodesk’s Civil 3D, write it out to a KML file and then drop it right into the cloud-based Nearmap application, MapBrowser.

To prevent safety hazards, they review typography that Nearmap provides every three months to ensure there aren’t any spoiled piles of debris left hidden in certain areas.

Obliques, vertical orthoimagery, and immersive 3D visualisation tools make it possible to cover more ground in great detail without needing to visit multiple site locations, multiple times a year.

Up-to-date and highly accurate visuals of project plans and conceptual designs give clients and collaborators real-world context for decision making and action.

Aerial images reduce confusion and accelerate review and approval because stakeholders clearly see the project in actual conditions.

With the latest available data to inform designs, you can better plan for the future and proactively prepare for unexpected events that might, for example, force community lockdowns or wipe out structures in high-risk flood zones.

Nearmap makes it easier to dynamically address fluctuations in pitch, relative height and distance throughout a project with high-resolution imagery that’s updated more frequently than other systems.

You can compare historical images against current ones to evaluate growth and compare seasonal variations in soil and vegetation to keep up with fast-growing, rapidly changing areas.

Tech alone won’t drive a successful build. Nearmap is intuitive to use and integrates with existing applications to improve efficiencies across your organisation. It acts as a single source of truth for stakeholders otherwise bogged down by disparate tools and steep learning curves.

“After getting in there and exploring a little bit, you become a competent user within just a couple of hours,” a spokesperson for the manufacturing company said.

There is no software installation and no need for hardware—simply plug and play into your favourite industry applications, so you can work smarter, not harder.

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