SmartSurvey™ receives major innovation award
The visionary partnership Vandpartner has presented its innovation award as the crowning achievement of the first six years of collaboration. The award went to LE34’s surveying app SmartSurvey™. We are proud – also on behalf of the partnership – because useful innovation emerges when we combine our ideas and commitment.
Innovation becomes useful when a new product makes things easier and can be used by many more people than those who developed it.
Common goals and combined efforts in the innovation process
The courage to venture into the unknown, the ability to turn customer needs into reality and the willingness to disrupt our own business for the benefit of something greater were among the reasons why LE34 received the East Jutland partnership Vandpartner’s innovation award for developing the SmartSurvey™ app.
We won ahead of eight other companies, each of which submitted its best innovation contribution from Vandpartner 1.0 during the period 2016–2021.
“LE34 has embraced the innovation partnership brilliantly. They have been persistent and maintained a positive level of energy, and when a breakthrough came, they succeeded in commercialising it so that everyone could use it,” says Karsten Lundbye, Head of Innovation at Aarhus Vand and a member of the award jury.
Peter Hjortdal, Head of Construction Projects, Aarhus Vand
All parties work together on solutions that can make things smarter. When everyone approaches innovation with openness, trust and honesty, the standard can be raised considerably. That is exactly what we experienced in the development of SmartSurvey™.
Karsten Lundbye, Head of Innovation at Aarhus Vand and a member of the innovation award jury
The beauty of it is that LE34 is disrupting its own business. They make it easy for others to perform some of the classic surveying services from which they usually earn money, thereby advancing the industry while also creating commercial value. It is a perceptive and impressively forward-looking approach.
From cardboard box to app
Vandpartner 1.0 is an ambitious partnership between the three East Jutland utility companies Aarhus Vand, Favrskov Forsyning and Samn Forsyning and their suppliers. Together with the utilities, 14 companies entered into a six-year partnership agreement that committed the parties to working closely together.
Peter Hjortdal, Head of Construction Projects at Aarhus Vand
SmartSurvey™ was conceived at a workshop where I spoke with LE34 about the challenges we face. One was the long time between work being carried out in the field and the data arriving and being entered into our utility network records. Together, we made a prototype from a cardboard box, which LE34 took away to develop further. Today, it is an app that can significantly optimise workflows, says Peter Hjortdal, Head of Construction Projects at Aarhus Vand.
Innovation benefiting utilities and contractors
With SmartSurvey™, collecting highly accurate data about a pipe in an open trench is now as easy as recording a video on a smartphone. The benefits for utilities and contractors are considerable: after completing pipework, they can collect the documentation themselves in the field, backfill the trench and reinstate the surface in a single workflow. At the same time, they obtain more information about the pipe than the few points recorded by traditional surveying.
The utility company Novafos also contributed to the development of SmartSurvey™ by testing prototypes of the app and collecting data from thousands of open trenches.
Vandpartner has begun a new round of six-year framework agreements under the name Vandpartner 2.0. Digitalisation and innovation remain central. LE34 renewed its framework agreement with Aarhus Vand and, in Vandpartner 2.0, took on a new role coordinating the creation of a geodata flow, giving everyone in the partnership access to current and complete utility network data.
LE34 genvinder kontrakt med Aarhus Vand
Torbjørn Mandahl Pedersen, Head of Utilities at LE34
It is fantastic to help develop something that creates value for our customers, and inspiring to see how proactive and open-minded both Vandpartner – which has created an excellent framework for innovation – and all the other parties have been. Whereas we previously tried to optimise our own part of a project to make the overall process work, we now work together to determine how best to pursue a shared goal.
Would you like to know more?
Contact us
Would you like to know more about LE34’s work in the utilities sector or the SmartSurvey™ surveying app? Please contact us.
Torbjørn Mandahl Pedersen
Chartered Surveyor and Partner
Head of Utilities and GIS
Tel. +45 8820 8758
tmp@le34.dk
