Filio Case Study – WRA Engineering Environmental Scientist Project

WRA Engineering teamed up with Filio to reduce time and resources needed to create photo logs. Filio deployed an add upgrade in under seven days to maximize user experience without losing time on the project.

The Project

WRA Engineering, a Filio customer, employs a team of environmental scientists to execute regulatory assessments for land development. These evaluations are often conducted as mitigation for construction projects, as environmental protocols require construction companies to restore a certain percentage of vegetation. One such project ensures the native vegetation inhabiting a Florida wetlands construction zone meets the criteria established in the development’s construction permit.
Tracking the zone’s plant life requires taking a photographic inventory of all vegetation within the area on a quarterly basis. In this case, an environmental scientist is responsible for taking photographs at 80 different photo locations – and photos facing north, south, east, and west must be captured at each location. When photos are compiled at the end of the year, the scientist must inventory, order, and report on more than 1,200 photos of plants – many of which look the same!

AUSTON GERMANO
SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST

WRA was using three different software to reach the same result Filio achieved on its own.

Filio’s Solution

Using Filio, WRA’s environmental scientists take photos and videos using the camera built into the Filio smartphone app. The mobile app automatically assigns a geolocation and measures the direction of each photo while allowing users to add voice notes and markup the images. Since Filio instantaneously syncs photos to the cloud, team members in the office can review information via a corresponding web platform as field crews collect onsite project data. In the web platform, users can organize photos into dedicated projects, making images standardized and searchable for subsequent editing, filtering, reporting, and presentation. Prior to implementing Filio, a WRA scientist would take a picture or video using a camera roll app, manually mark GPS locations on individual photos in a separate global positioning system (GPS), and finally create a map in a geographic information system (GIS). Filio achieves all three of these functions, streamlining WRA’s photo management process from three software to one.

My favorite thing is the convenience and time saving factor. I use Filio every time I am in the field.

Going the Extra Mile

When WRA first deployed Filio in their wetlands monitoring project, the app enabled rich data collection in the field, but the users still faced an enormous challenge. The project included more than 1,200 photos of similar trees and landscapes, making it extremely difficult for the WRA team to differentiate between images within the project. Filio originally sorted images by date, which was sufficient for smaller photo collections, but did not suffice for the wetlands survey’s enormous document library. Filio and WRA discussed the issue on a conference call and identified the solution: the web platform needed a sort-by-description feature. Within seven days, the Filio team updated the program to enable document sorting using any field: not only date, but also name, description, and geolocation. WRA scientists can hover over a thumbnail of any image in the photo log to view the name, accompanying description, and coordinates. With this capability at their fingertips, the WRA team can easily identify critical information about each photo (such as which cardinal direction it faces). The feature turned a multi-day sorting process into a simple click and is now available to Filio customers everywhere.