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How Land & Water shored up project success with Digital Utilities Overview Plan

The leading civil engineering group benefitted from time savings and increased peace of mind when it tried out Landmark Geodata’s digital utilities solution. 

 

The situation 

Land & Water Group provides civil engineering and environmental operations for challenging projects, wherever the land meets water. For more than 40 years, the business has supported government agencies, large corporations and private individuals through in-depth environmental knowledge, creative problem-solving mindset and proprietary specialist equipment to solve complex engineering challenges. 

The challenge 

Land & Water plays a vital role in helping maintain and preserve the UK’s waterways, thanks to its dredging expertise and specialist equipment. However, any dredging project requires vital due diligence in the first instance, including understanding the presence of utilities infrastructure.  

Previously, Land & Water had ordered Utilities reports from Landmark, receiving reports comprising of data from multiple utilities providers. As project manager James Dennis explained: “Our projects can be quite linear, meaning we could be dredging several miles of canal, so for a 10-mile section the service information could be up to 100 pages from several providers. Going through all of that information separately was really time-consuming and the possibility of human error – missing an affected service, for instance – was always present.” 

The solution

When Landmark approached Land & Water with news of its new Digital Utilities Overview Plan (DUOP), the timing could not have been better. DUOP, available through Landmark’s environmental reports provider Envirocheck, can be ordered at the same time as any utility report. It provides detailed information from up to 45 utilities about a specific site, outlining gas and oil pipelines, electricity cables, mains water supplies, telecommunication wires, sewers and fibre-optic cables, and is quickly delivered by email in a KMZ file. 

The Land & Water team trialled DUOP on an initial project and found that they could easily overlay the information in the KMZ file onto Google Earth, which they use extensively. This way, it was easy to simply email the KMZ file to the site manager, who could then locate the project location and see all relevant services in one place. Land & Water found that this worked especially well on site when using tablets, ensuring that project teams had all necessary information at their fingertips. 

“Using the Digital Utilities Overview Plan from Envirocheck has freed up a lot of man hours that we’d otherwise spend sifting through various bits of information. But more than that, it’s given us all peace of mind so that we’re no longer relying on a process that’s vulnerable to human error.” 

James Dennis 

Project Manager, Land & Water 

The result

In the past, Land & Water teams might have spent around five hours per 5km section of canal, manually checking utilities reports and plotting relevant information to present to site teams. Now, this process is made almost instantaneous with DUOP. As well as saving considerable amounts of time per project, Land & Water also credits DUOP with bringing greater certainty and less risk to its site due diligence procedures. 

“We were delighted when the team at Land & Water agreed to try DUOP, because it was created precisely with businesses like theirs in mind. Successful environmental projects rely on accurate information being readily available and actionable – DUOP combines Landmark’s renowned scope of data with a great digital UX that equips project teams with the exact data they need in actionable formats.” 

Stuart Inwood 

Client Director, Landmark Geodata  

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