Geospatial Examples of Work

GIS Legacy Data Migration/Modernization

Challenge - The client employed a 30-year-old legacy, custom-built application for the housing of tabular data. While the integrity of the legacy data was questionable, the migration to a new GIS COTS solution was a daunting challenge.

Solution - Rather than deploy an entirely new system, MBS developers migrated the legacy tabular data into an ArcGIS Enterprise Datastore. MBS automated the reading and interpreting of the data from disparate data sources, allowing us to cleanse the data and identify records that had either incorrect or missing data.

Impact – With the data now cleansed and verified, the customer was able to focus on value-add initiatives in the next phase of the project rather than questioning the data’s accuracy.

ArcGIS Application Integration with Two-Way Sync

Challenge - Integrating ArcGIS into workflow applications isn’t always easy and requires a deep understanding of ArcGIS and the target application. In this instance, the client required transparent queries into ArcGIS from the Salesforce application side. Once queried, the GIS data had to populate the Salesforce workflow page seamlessly.

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Solution - MBS implemented ArcGIS data inside the Salesforce application, thereby not requiring the end-user to leave Salesforce to access the GIS data. Additionally, the client required a two-way synchronization update capability to the GIS data. By creating an ArcGIS Server Object Interceptor (SOI), MBS was able to block or allow writes to the ESRI geodatabase.

Impact - The newly implemented integration helped to improve operational efficiencies and ensured geospatial data integrity within both enterprise systems.

Water Resource Tracking and Monitoring

Challenge - The customer is responsible for managing a water system that included dams, irrigation structures, power structures, and the associated assets used to support the system. They were coordinating over 170 different entities and projects without a unified tool stack or an enterprise-wide view of the system. MBS worked with the client to bring efficiencies and modern tools into play.

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Leveraging Technology for Effective Decision Making

Challenge - A client needed a solution that could serve as a single source of truth to organize and coordinate their program activities.

Solution - To address this need, MBS’s team of physical scientists developed a cloud-based system of geospatial web applications. Known collectively, as the Decision Support Tool (DST), this technology allows access to financial statistics, organizational asset information, infrastructure photographs, and geospatial data that this information is tied to. The DST also provides automatic graphical representations of this data based on user queries, including graphs, charts, and time sliders.

Impact - The system provides a common portal with powerful, customized tools that fuel one data source – helping management make the best decisions to support their mission.

Merging AI and GIS into Predictive Modeling

Challenge - For Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP’s) in rural locations, monitoring system usage and health is paramount. Outages result in costly interventions and man-hours to troubleshoot and remediate networks. While outages can be the result of hardware failure, the more common cause is weather-related incidents.

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Solution - MBS has created a GIS-enabled view of the network with weather overlays in conjunction with a rural WISP. Using predictive AI algorithms, outages can be understood as either related to weather or attributed to equipment failure. Additional algorithms can be inserted by adding seasonal factors such as foliage growth and shedding. This enables a predictive capability that considers the impact of falling leaves in the fall or canopy growth in the spring and the associated effect on WISP regional service.

Impact - For future planning initiatives, the customer can utilize these algorithms to inform on improved placement and management of assets.

Picture of a cell phone with a graph on it

GIS Integration for a National Fluid Leasing Program

Challenge - While migrating GIS data from one legacy application into a GIS-enabled solution is difficult enough, collecting and collating data from diverse and non-unified sub-agencies of the same organization is problematic.

Solution - Faced with a piecemeal approach by eight separate sub-agencies and an assortment of data sources, MBS was brought on board to create a unified platform that allowed the client to coordinate the fluid leasing bidding process across all regions. Additionally, MBS integrated a traditionally oral bidding process into a more efficient online e-commerce capability.

Impact - The introduction of this GIS centric, unified solution enabled the client to view and manage data in a more efficient and effective manner, paving the way to maximize bid activity and bid price actualized.

Enabling Enterprise Geospatial Data Management

Challenge - Managing conservation efforts for a program that annually administers more than 1.3 billion dollars in grants to State and Territory resource agencies requires technology that can effectively track activities and report performance data.

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Solution - To support this effort, MBS developed a Cloud-based, enterprise, geospatial data management system to manage and track grants, related projects and locations, and accomplishments. Using ESRI ArcGIS APIs, MBS built a fully featured, web-enabled mapping interface for users to enter geospatial information about their projects.

Impact - This added functionality allows users to manually create geo-data, copy geo-data from third-party sources, and import GIS data from other systems, creating efficiencies and improving operational performance.

Advancing Geospatial Infrastructure

Challenge - A federal agency needed a way to integrate and consolidate their many, disparate systems used to track environmental-related projects and activities across multiple programs.

Solution - MBS developed a web-enabled geospatial application which included solutions for users at remote, low-bandwidth offices and integrated mapping functions. The mapping functions required advanced geospatial capabilities such as a Service Object Interceptor (SOI) designed to help synchronize geodatabases and progress the ongoing GIS modernization effort to streamline interactions between applications, users, and the Esri platform.

Impact - Having one system of record eliminated the need to rely on multiple tools that captured the same data and helped increase efficiencies by reducing labor and costs.