With the Government travel restrictions remaining in place for the foreseeable future, both domestic and international, site visits have become a serious risk to organisations.

But could this challenge present an opportunity for asset stakeholders to significantly reduce costs, and bring forward the adoption of remote inspection and digital surveying?

The end of physical site visits?

Physically attending a project site, whether to conduct a condition survey, pre-acquisition sign-off, construction monitoring or even a site recce, has long been seen as a necessary outing. Often involving multiple stakeholders travelling to site, sometimes from abroad, and typically on a number of occasions during the project to gather data and communicate information.

However, COVID-19 has forced the discussion as to whether these physical site visits are indeed necessary and if ‘business as usual’ has changed forever, and for the better.

Cutting costs and carbon in a digital age

Historically overlooked however, is the significant bottleneck created by the ‘need’ to attend a site. Time required pre planning visits, travel to and from – with investors sometimes having to travel in from abroad. The actual time on site, meaning the dreaded ‘I’m out on site and won’t be contactable until…’ automated email response. Ultimately meaning those staff spend the remainder of their week deciphering site notes and catching up on missed emails.

There’s the costs, cost of travel, accommodation, staff wages etc – all costs which ultimately have to be covered by the end client.
Then what about the carbon footprint of all of this travel? With most organisations striving for carbon neutrality a great deal of savings could be made by addressing the need for physical site visits in this digital age.

All of this was true long before the pandemic arrived, creating huge risks to people and businesses. But challenging us to ask the question, can we do better?

Fully remote visits with Reality Capture

Working in collaboration with our clients, we’ve developed a suite of Reality Capture services which fully enable remote site visits and stakeholder engagement.

The first weapon in our digital site visit armoury is the ability to stream real time data directly from the drone to any remote location around the world via DroneStream.

Nationwide drones uses the very best of technology, flanked with a highly knowledgeable team that know how to drive the best results and reliably deliver it to their clients. I’ve seen them go the extra mile for customers and produce incredible results in difficult scenarios.

This level of up-to-date industry knowledge and insight gives way to a better standard, and lower risk than what you would see from an in-house team. With a national reach, the team are able to take away the strain of visiting sites all over the country to perform inspections, progress updates, expert oversight, client tours and so much more.

Nationwide Drones use DroneStream to power this capability by streaming video into a video conferencing tool like MS Teams or Zoom, enabling clients to watch their site while instructing the pilot to what they want to see in real-time.

 

Harry Howe – CEO, DroneStream

 

This ability to communicate live site data to all stakeholders simultaneously, allowing important decisions to be made without delay is already generating substantial savings for our clients. Whilst also meaning a surveyor can now conduct multiple virtual site visits in a day – this means increased efficiency and therefore increased revenue for your business.

“With the impact of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions that this has placed on project travel, my ability to fly to Northern Ireland at the end of 2019 was in doubt.

However, with Mike and his team at Nationwide Drones onboard for the project, their advanced technology has enabled my client the option of having a high-level survey done in the interim period. Nationwide Drones provided me with a live high-resolution video stream directly from the site to my home office 260 miles away!

The platform also provided a messaging system so that I could communicate with the drone pilot in real-time and request positions around the building that I wanted to see. With Nationwide Drones’ local operators across the United Kingdom, this service can provide my clients with financial savings and allow us as surveyors to reduce the need for working at height in the future.”

 

Bradley Smith – Investment Services, WSP

Remote inspections with Nationwide Drones

With Nationwide drone operators spread UK wide, all with the facility to stream high resolution, real time footage direct to your home office or mobile device when you’re on the go – there is no longer any reason to jeopardise the safety of your staff with slow, expensive site visits.

Follow us on LinkedIn and check out the website as we continue to explore the future of Reality Capture and the dawn of the digital surveyor.