Project wrap-up

Increasing Location Intelligence for Mercy Corps

Our team has recently undertaken a rewarding effort to help Mercy Corps improve their location intelligence capabilities for better program monitoring, performance assessment, and situational awareness in areas around the globe where the non-governmental aid organization conducts disaster relief and economic development programs.
In their own words:

“Mercy Corps partners with creative thinkers from the private and public sectors to develop social innovations that transform lives. New technology, business models and creative partnerships provide transformational opportunities for overcoming poverty and despair.”

Our team’s partnership with Mercy Corps has involved implementing a Performance Atlas visualization and interactive mapping system that allows for:

  • Review, monitoring, and assessment of key performance indicators
  • Field mission planning support
  • Integration and assessment of field-collected data
  • Collaborative, visual communication among remote project partners and stakeholders.

We are now collaborating with Mercy Corps and members of the Barr and Kellogg Foundation to determine how the Location Intelligence system used for a pilot project in Haiti may be further extended and applied to other programs across the globe.  This is in support of Mercy Corp’s mission to leverage [a] robust global program platform to identify breakthrough ideas, test them in the field, and scale them broadly.”

Right-Of-Way tracking with Performance Atlas

ECIlogoClient:  Electrical Contractors, Inc

ECI is a full service Engineering Design Firm specializing in the Power & Telecommunications Industry. They have offices in Montana, Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and more planned to open on the East Coast.

Goal: Provide efficient Right-Of-Way activity tracking capability leveraging the best of contemporary web technologies.

Services Provided: The Gartrell Group worked closely with company stakeholders to develop a detailed understanding of their Right-Of-Way workflows and desires for improvements and new capabilities. We then applied this information to adapt a Performance Atlas® deployment suited to their defined needs.

Pulling from the wide-variety of components available to our Performance Atlas®, we were able to provide ECI with a comprehensive solution that gives users access to different projects and the associated data, such as landowner contacts, tasks, financial information, public comments and the ability to toggle between a map-centric and journal view.

Key Technologies:  GIS Hosting, Performance Atlas (Software-as-a-Service)

GIS Hosting for CB&I

Client:  CB&I
CB&I is a global energy infrastructure company with approximately 50,000 employees, working from more than 30 countries.  Growth in demand for GIS services from globally distributed customer groups presented the CB&I GIS and IT teams with a variety of challenges.  These challenges led them to seek assistance from the Gartrell Group to design, implement, and host specialized GIS infrastructure that would offer internal GIS staff, partners, and end users an improved level of service.

Goal: Establish high-performance production GIS infrastructure to support internal and external customers of this globally distributed, Fortune 500 company. 

Services Provided:The Gartrell Group collaborated with CB&I GIS and IT personnel to design, and then implement a high availability (HA), multi-tiered enterprise GIS platform.  The platform includes both data, and application tiers. It supports distributed/ remote editing teams, synchronization with corporate data systems, and integration of mobile data collection, all while conforming to CB&I’s IT security architecture and policy.

The hosted environment has been in production for over five years. The Gartrell Group has provided ongoing enterprise support services which include 24×7×365 system monitoring, regular systems analysis, engineering support, architectural planning and upgrade support.

Key Technologies:  GIS Hosting, ESRI ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE, Microsoft SQL Server, Mobile GIS

“You guys have been there for us.  This is one partnership that has really worked out.  We are definitely more effective since we made the transition to have you host our GIS systems.“  – Bill Harvey, Technical Manager, Geospatial & Information Management, CB&I.