CASE STUDY

Any well-run organisation will tell you the same thing: its most valuable asset is its people.

For a local authority that often means long-serving, dedicated staff who carry an extraordinary amount of information in their heads—what needs doing, where everything is, what state each job sits in. It’s knowledge built over years, but it’s also knowledge that can walk out the door.

Picture a city council team responsible for parks, planning, council tax, waste collection, property and customer services—not to mention the endless lists of physical assets alongside. Sometimes, the record of those assets is scattered across disconnected records and paperwork, but often they’re not written down at all: they live in the memory of the people whose remit they fall under. So, when someone leaves or retires, for the rest of the team everyday work becomes harder, slower and less certain. Confidence in the data starts to fall.

Chelmsford City Council know better than most the importance of data. “I’m the Data and GIS Lead,” Amin Sule tells us, “pretty much managing all our spatial data, all of the GIS systems, and the address management side, too.”

Amin’s team provides GIS services right across the council, from corporate property, planning and parks to waste, recycling, council tax and customer services. They also work closely with Geoplace and Ordnance Survey, feeding address points into the National Geographic Database (NGD) via Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPGs), plus using NGD for building base layers and analysis.

But it soon became apparent that there had been a potentially critical issue lurking in the background. Benches, bins, lamp columns and street furniture; all the physical assets that maintenance teams look after, the data of which was living mostly in people’s heads and had never been systematically captured at all.

The challenge

For Amin and the team, the push toward accurate field capture began with a serious public safety requirement. Following incidents elsewhere in the UK in which unstable gravestones had toppled, local authorities were under pressure to carry out “topple testing” across cemetery sites and to evidence exactly what they’d done.

That meant recording the precise position of individual gravestones, with stringent requirements. “There was a real need to capture the data accurately,” Amin explains, “so we could submit the audit and say, ‘here it is, this is the topple testing we’ve done, this is exactly where this point is.’ We were using phones before, but the accuracy was between five to eight metres or so.”

To do the job properly, Chelmsford invested for the first time in high-accuracy GNSS, an Eos Positioning Systems’ Arrow 100 receiver initially, and the gravestone-mapping project became the proof of what accurate capture could deliver.

Which opened up a world of possibilities for Amin and the team. “We have a lot of assets, and we’d never really captured them,” says Amin. “Assets were pretty much in everybody’s heads, which is crazy, because when people leave, they take that knowledge with them.” For a council, that reliance on individual memory is a recurring operational risk: maintenance depends on individuals’ knowledge, and every departure erodes the record.

The solution (part 1)

With high-accuracy GNSS already in place, the path forward was clear: start systematically building an asset database. “It just made sense to take it out and start capturing things like our benches, our bins, our lamp columns,” Amin says. “Since then, we’ve been going across Chelmsford capturing assets and pinpointing exactly where they are.”

The GNSS capability that made this work was integration. Chelmsford could pair the receiver with ArcGIS Field Maps on a tablet, to allow data to flow straight into ArcGIS Online in real time, with none of the old download-and-process cumbersome cycle. “We pair it with ArcGIS Field Maps, design the form, link our tablets, and it goes directly back, which means we have data in real time. There’s none of the usual coming back and downloading like in the old days. It’s pretty much instant.”

This was vital for the Chelmsford Council team, because seamlessness had been a decisive factor in their decision to invest in GNSS. “One of the biggest fears when we were buying a GNSS system was: is it going to work with our current system?” Amin recalls. “They all download data, but if we could have something seamless, that was the biggest seller: collect the data in real time and it goes straight in. No need to go back to the office and process it.”

The solution (part 2)

Having proven the approach with the Arrow GNSS device, Amin saw a further opportunity to evolve their GNSS approach and develop the way the team worked to new heights of success. Amin met with the MGISS team at an Ordnance Survey conference, where the Skadi 100 GNSS receiver was being demoed, and discussed ways to make the upgrade straightforward and even more economical. “The team were happy with it and they just said, ‘fantastic, go for it!’.”

Though the Arrow 100 had been an invaluable tool for Chelmsford since their investment, there had been times when there had been some resistance to using it. “One of the things that put people off was getting it set up,” Amin explains. For teams less used to set up or simply wanting a ‘turn on and go’ device for a quick job, this sometimes meant leaving the kit in the cupboard.

The Skadi 100 quickly proved to Amin that any useability barrier would be removed entirely. With its compact and handheld design, and with no antenna to assemble or pole to raise, Amin’s team can simply hold it in place and capture from the word go. “The team were quite excited about the fact that they can just handhold it,” Amin agrees. That ease of use directly addressed the risk of kit going unused: a device people can simply pick up and take out is a device that gets used regularly and consistently.

This ease-of-use benefit that the Skadi offers is a theme echoed by other MGISS customers. At Sheffield City Council, for instance, the Public Rights of Way team found the Skadi so straightforward that staff with no real GIS experience could pick it up and use it without needing formal training, which is exactly the kind of accessibility a busy maintenance team needs.

According to Amin, there was also an unexpected benefit that particularly suits a local authority: discretion. The Skadi’s compact form draws far less attention on the street than a tall, antenna-topped pole, or a device mounted on a tripod, meaning teams can work discreetly without attracting too much public attention or concern.

The result

For Chelmsford, the transformation is fundamental: accurate asset data and knowledge existing in a trusted, shared database, that won’t walk out the door with staff changes. “The massive difference is just being able to physically have data in a database, rather than in people’s heads,” Amin confirms. “We’re not dependent on someone’s knowledge anymore. We can apply that to anybody to go out there and look.” It amounts to a change of working practice the council had been building towards for years. Accurate GNSS, paired with ArcGIS, is making that achievable.

Because capture is real-time and lands straight into ArcGIS Online, the whole organisation benefits from faster, wider access. “It goes without saying the efficiency is huge, because more people have access to it,” Amin explains. “It’s captured in real time, straight onto ArcGIS Online—it’s not a case of people waiting for it to be processed.” Maintenance teams can see when an asset was last checked or updated, and can amend records on the spot when something has changed in the field.

Accurate points also feed directly into operational systems. Chelmsford’s waste team, for example, is adopting routing software to plan collections, and precise asset location capability makes that possible—with accurate points captured, collection routes can be planned and followed reliably.

The asset register is still a work in progress, but the direction is set, and new uses keep emerging. The council is exploring how the receiver could support ground-penetrating radar surveys (GPR), using the Skadi to follow a set route while capturing what lies beneath. “If I’ve already got a GNSS unit, why rent an additional one?” Amin says. “We could draw the route and follow it using the Skadi, to capture the data underneath and know exactly where those pipes are sitting.”

For any council or public authority, funding new kit means making a clear case, and for Amin, this was an easy one—the strongest argument being continuity. “It gives you a contingency,” he explains. “Whether somebody leaves, or they’re off ill, you have continued flow. Putting the business case forward wasn’t difficult, because the benefits were there straight away—you couldn’t not see them.”

Against the cost of retraining staff and the risk of losing undocumented knowledge, the investment was quickly justified. “The benefits outweigh the cost any day,” Amin says. “It was always going to be an easy win.”

For Chelmsford City Council, the story is one of steady, compounding value: a safety-driven project that proved the worth of accurate GNSS, an asset database that is making services more resilient, and an upgrade to the Skadi 100 that makes the whole approach easier to sustain day to day. By pairing high-accuracy GNSS with ArcGIS Field Maps and ArcGIS Online, the council is turning disconnected, memory-held knowledge into a trusted, shared and lasting record of what it manages, and where.