Transforming data management in the geo-environmental industry

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Originating in discussions within Mole Valley District Council regarding a need to streamline and automate complex data management in the sector, Leap Environmental was formed as a specialist environmental consultancy firm.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The geo-environmental and environmental health industries are responsible for land management and brownfield site redevelopment. These industries rely on surveys, investigations and modelling, inherent in which is the gathering of intricately detailed sets of data. Processing these has historically been a time-consuming challenge: accuracy is vital, while existing environmental data handling (EDH) systems are generally expensive and thus not suited to SMEs and consultants.

PROJECT BRIEF

In partnership, Leap Environmental, Grey Zone and Red River set out to develop specific software that would address these longstanding data management issues. Key requirements included support for multiple sites and data streams, and for laboratory and historical data. As a strategic partner, Red River would provide software development services and consultancy, product design services, and sales and marketing expertise.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Red River developed Veridata, a software tool to ensure that data used in geo-environmental assessment is valid, cleaned, and in a format on which users can make valid queries and judgements. Veridata imports current lab data, but additionally imports and validates valuable historical data using bespoke optical character recognition. A clever system of data dictionaries and character recognition algorithms is designed to recognise and process idiosyncrasies of spelling, formatting, and data entry, learning from previous use to maximise speed and accuracy.

RESULTS

In Veridata, our client has an elegant, groundbreaking environmental data processing platform which greatly enhances its ability to make accurate decisions about land contamination. On individual projects, the time taken for data analysis is reduced by about 75%, while the savings potential from improved decision making can amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

A transformative and industry-challenging product, Veridata was awarded Best Science Advancement in the 2015 Brownfield Briefing Awards.

Red River simply ‘get’ the business – they work on business objectives and actual need. They helped us to overcome the belief that writing our own software [would be] more expensive or cumbersome than off-the-shelf.
Richard Brinkworth, director, Leap Environmental

To successfully deliver for a client is always the goal. To create something so useful for an entire sector, build great partnerships and attract such industry support is just fantastic.
Simon Pringle, director, Red River

The impact of what we have now developed with Red River and Grey Zone has changed our view of the bigger picture, and the opportunities for our business, forever.
Richard Brinkworth, director, Leap Environmental

PROJECT TECH DECISIONS

As a fully objective, unbiased consultancy team we firmly believe that the technology should follow the need, not the other way around. We make our decisions based on the most appropriate technologies available at the time. Here's what we used on this project:

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