In a recent report, Robert Young, LS, provides a look at the current business climate and discusses some tips to stay ahead of the competition along with details of how Young and Associates is faring throughout this downturn. Of particular interest I though was Young’s mention of GIS and the use of GIS by his company. From Robert…
The investment and effort involved in building and daily maintenance of our company GIS base map has been one of the main keys to our success in the oil and gas survey market in Texas. Back in the late 1990s, Rene Garcia and I began creating an intelligent digital map (database) with survey grade GPS from the 25 years of oil and gas survey data on Texas State Plane Grid Coordinates that had been gathered from nearly 120 counties. At the time, a majority of the employees were opposed to spending money to map jobs that were already completed, but it just made sense to me for the value we would get from having a database of all of our survey projects at our fingertips on a computer screen.
It took several years to get the jobs into a database, and to scan all of the field notes, maps, plats, and link all of the data files and project folders to survey grade data points on a digital map. Today, the result of the legacy data is the base map for the perpetuation of repeatable earth addresses (State Plane Coordinates with metadata) for all survey projects as they are completed. We know where we have been, and as we take in new projects, we send our crews to the field with the best information in order to maximize survey success. The map and database grow every day.