Survey Manager Best Practices: Eliminate Delays with Real-Time Data Syncing

In this session, Technical Support Representative Miguel Martinez talks about how to stop the back-and-forth between the field and office and shows you how to use PCS, FDC, and Survey Manager to finalize data while you’re still standing at the test station.

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Speakers

David Gautier, Product Manager & Host

Miguel Martinez, Technical Support

Nita Teng, Marketing Ops Lead

Transcript

Opening Remarks

David Gautier
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this month’s virtual brew — glad everybody could make it. My name’s David Gautier, and joining me today is Miguel Martinez. Miguel is on our technical support team — he’s been with AI for about a year and a half, and he’s an expert on Survey Manager, which is what we’re digging into today. As we’re getting into the thick of survey season, we really just wanted to equip you all with best practices for getting your data to and from the field as efficiently as possible.
If you go to the next slide there, Miguel.

We’re getting through some of the craziness of survey season — of event season — but we still have a decent amount of opportunity to get out and see you all coming up. In about a month, we’re going to be at the American Water Works Conference, and in the same week, up in Norman, Oklahoma, at the OU Corrosion Control Course — the 72nd annual. Then over to Missouri a couple days later for the Mega Pipeline Safety Seminar. In July, we have one right in our backyard — the Railroad Regulatory Conference here in Round Rock. We’ll be at the SGA Operations Conference at the end of July, and then in August we’ll be at the Louisiana LGA Pipeline Safety Conference. And of course, couldn’t move on from events without mentioning our annual AI World Users Group Conference, beginning of November — those dates are locked in, November 1st through the 5th.

We’ll do the typical format we’ve done the past few years — training on Monday, then content Tuesday and Wednesday, with a visit to our office and practical hands-on on Thursday. It’s in a new location this year, different from the last few years — closer to downtown, on 8th Street, so walkable, with a lot to do down there. Hope to see everybody there in November.

And without further ado, I’ll pass it over to Miguel.

Miguel Martinez: Survey Manager Overview & Demo

Miguel Martinez
All right, thank you for that, David. Can everybody hear me?

Yeah, got you loud and clear.

Miguel Martinez
All right. Thank you for taking the time to join us on this virtual brew. I want to give a quick agenda here — as we’re getting ready for survey season, like David said, we want to give you some best practices for people currently using Survey Manager, as well as a quick overview for anyone who’s interested in the product, and a refresher for anyone who needs one.

So we’re going to go over the setup of the wireless integration, the process of developing your survey in PCS and sending it to Survey Manager, how the wireless integration system works, and some management tips for your sidebar access within Survey Manager.

While we’re going through this, if anyone has questions, we’re lucky enough to have David here to answer anything I’m not able to get to in time. Let’s get started.

Quick introduction: Survey Manager is a web-based app you can use to centralize your data in a graphical sense, using a map-based workspace. This allows technicians to see their data more graphically, laying out their test points or other facilities they’re taking surveys on — including close-interval surveys, indirect surveys, and facility surveys.

One of the key points of Survey Manager is closing the gap between office workers and technicians out in the field. You’re able to instantaneously send survey data to and from each other, make corrections, and see real-time data of any surveys currently being taken. It also lets you clean up your data and identify errors you need to adjust, along with trends or anomalies you might not typically catch in a more database-like setting.

So, first things first — with the PCS data system, you want to link it up with Survey Manager. This is usually done through a process called setting up your wireless token. In this video, you can see: in Survey Manager, you click on your profile title, then click the Integration tab. From there, you’ll see an option to generate a token — a unique identifier you’ll paste inside PCS. Once that’s set up, PCS is now linked with your Survey Manager.

Next, you’ll want to send the survey to Survey Manager and set it up in PCS. This includes making your selections in the hierarchy — either by selecting each line or segment individually, or by building a route and selecting that route for sending to Survey Manager. You’ll go to Field Computer Send, review your prompts — as a reminder, this is the section where you add the information and inspection fields that get sent to the field data collector app, whether that’s on an iPad or our Mesa 3 tablets.

Once you’ve checked that, you’ll include all your facility types. In this video, you can see the list of facility types to include in your survey at the top — check the box for whichever ones you want, give the survey a name, and in the Options tab in the middle of the screen, select “Send to Survey Manager,” then hit Apply. If everything looks fine, hit Send, and you’ll see a pop-up that says “Send Complete.” Now you’ve taken the survey from PCS to cloud storage, and it’s prepped for import into Survey Manager.

The next step is importing the survey into the Survey Manager platform. Once you sign in, go to your navigation bar on the side — this is where you’ll house and organize all your surveys. Once the survey has been sent from PCS to Survey Manager, make a selection in your navigation bar — that could be a technician name or a survey type; there are multiple ways to organize this. Click the plus button for Survey Manager, and a window will pop up that says “Import from Cloud.” If it was sent successfully, you’ll see the survey you sent in that list at the bottom — go ahead and import it. Once you do, you should see the survey appear on the navigation bar on the left side.

Now, once your survey is in Survey Manager, you’ll want to use the function we call “groups,” where you make selections of the facilities included in the survey you sent. In this video, I have a few test points I sent to Survey Manager, and I’m selecting my points. There are two windows at the bottom to be aware of: the one on the bottom left is “Currently Viewing Group,” and there’s another window on the bottom right called the “Groups Sending” window.

There are multiple ways to add points to your group window. You can use the map function — not shown in this video — where, once the survey is set up with coordinates (latitude and longitude), the points will show up on the map. We have a polygon tool, which lets you draw a container around whatever points are currently on the map, select and group them together, and add them to the bottom-right window — the currently viewing group — where you’ll see all the points you’re preparing to send to the field data collector app.

There’s also a way to do this within the table pane, which is how I’ve done it in this video: use Control-click on whichever points you want, then right-click on any of the highlighted points, and you’ll get an option to “Add to Group Window.” There’s also an option to add all the points in that bottom-right currently viewing window at once, and you can delete or remove them from the group window if you don’t need to send all of them.

Once you have the survey set with all the points you intend to send to the field data collector, hit the Save button on the bottom right. It’ll ask you to give the survey a name, and once that’s done, it transfers over to the right side. In the video, once my group is created and on the right side, I assign it to whichever technician currently has access to Survey Manager.

You’ll be able to track the flow of the group sent to the FDC through our status window. Once it’s properly assigned from Survey Manager to the FDC tablet, the status changes to “Assigned” — meaning it has successfully left Survey Manager and is waiting for the FDC app to receive it. Once the user opens the FDC app and sees the survey, the status changes to “In Progress” — meaning the user has successfully received the survey, it’s on their tablet, and they’re ready to conduct the survey at any time.

Once you’re done with the survey, you’ll want to send it back to the cloud, or back to Survey Manager, where the data will automatically sync and you’ll be able to view it. On the FDC app, as you can see in this picture, you have Upload, Export, and Survey — these serve different functions. Exporting a survey creates a file of the completed survey for you to upload to PCS or other staging systems you might use. Uploading the survey is what actually gets it back to Survey Manager. I know from experience this can be a point of confusion — it’s a good rule of thumb to remember that “upload” is synonymous with the wireless function of Survey Manager.

Once the survey is uploaded, you’ll see in the second picture here that our data is now viewable in Survey Manager, with the completed points. I added some data here and sent it back, just to verify that the connection is working and that the data is correct.
So, like David said, in preparation for survey season, we wanted to give a few pointers on sidebar access management. Most of this is controlled by the admins for your company — they can organize the sidebar based on how they’d like, and control what users are allowed to access. Generally, in my experience, most companies either keep a single list of surveys on the navigation bar, or give each technician their own slot, as you can see in this picture.

The latter is what I consider the better organization method, because giving each user their own slot gives you clear definition on what that technician is working on. This is also useful if you have contractors — you can manage who has access to what. So, for instance, if I were a contractor sending surveys, those would be uploaded to the contractor tab, and you’d know that any work completed by the contractor falls under that organization method. Again, admins have the ability to click on their profile name in Survey Manager and use the sidebar access function — this includes controlling access to the indirect survey, facility survey, and snap view modules within Survey Manager.

And in line with our real-time issue resolution — one of the highlighted points of using Survey Manager is being able to send survey data instantaneously, so Survey Manager users can view it immediately and catch any inconsistencies or issues with the data.

For instance, here I have a picture where I entered incorrect data. What I’d do is go back to my survey — I don’t need to send a new survey, or an entire survey; I can just send that one point or facility in question and reopen the same survey on my tablet. I enter the new data, as you can see in the picture next to the first one, where I’d entered the incorrect data — and now at the bottom, you can see the correct data is there, and you can verify it’s the most recent record because you can see my last sync date against the first time I sent the data.

In Survey Manager, you’re able to see when a survey has new data for you to view as the individual user. On the navigation bar — depending on how you organize it — that’s also a feature technicians like: they don’t want to scroll through each survey to verify that data’s been uploaded, so we have a feature on the navigation bar that highlights anytime there’s a data change. You’ll be able to see that and manage your data integrity at a faster pace.

Just wanted to see if there were any questions at this time. Do we have any questions in the chat, David?

Q&A

Nita Teng
Hi, everyone — my name is Nita Teng. I’m on the marketing team here at American Innovations. It looks like David is having a little bit of technical trouble, so I’ll jump right in. Miguel, looks like David has a question.

Miguel Martinez
Sure.

Nita Teng
He was asking — is that something field users can modify, or does admin have to? I think he’s referring to something you were —

Miguel Martinez
Okay.

Nita Teng
— talking about a little bit earlier. And he also asked: is the real-time data review only in the latest version of FDC?

Miguel Martinez
For the second question — real-time data review — that’s in the most recent version, I believe. We’re currently on version 2.3, and I believe it’s with the current version. For the first question — if they’re asking whether the navigation bar is modifiable by a regular tech user versus an admin — the user does have the ability to organize it. I know some admins might have a concern that if their technician can reorganize this, they don’t want them to. That’s where sidebar access comes in. So if I have three groups in my Survey Manager, and I don’t want one group to have access to another group’s tab — where they’re housing the surveys they’re currently working on — you can manage that through sidebar access, so a user in, say, group one, only sees their own tab in the navigation bar.

Nita Teng
Chris asked: can we get your contact info in case we have any questions setting up or using this system? Hey, Chris — we have a great support system here. After the presentation, we’ll send you Nicole’s information and get you connected directly.

Miguel Martinez
Yeah, absolutely. We also have our technical support line, and our email as well. Using those avenues, our technical support team will see it, and you’re able to call in anytime — our working hours are 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Were there any other last-minute questions?

Looks like that’s it. Appreciate everyone this morning. If you all have any follow-up questions — Nita dropped our support contact there — feel free to reach out. We’re happy to help with any additional questions about Survey Manager. Thanks, and have a great rest of your week.

Miguel Martinez
Thank you, David.