With the insights of consulting engineering disciplines being steadily enhanced by the use of powerful digital technologies, SRK Consulting (South Africa) underpins its professional work with an in-house Data Services function.
This is delivering valuable results for SRK’s consulting teams, leading to the development of specialised digital solutions to streamline workflows and push boundaries of innovation, according to Ansu Louw, Principal GIS Consultant and Data Services Lead at SRK Consulting (South Africa).
“We initially put together a small data services unit in 2020, as part of our interest in digital transformation,” says Louw. “This has since grown to a staff of eight, including data engineers, software developers and data scientists”.
Automation for efficiency
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the fast-tracking of online communication and other platforms, but the unit now focuses on data engineering to harness digital technology for more efficient and streamlined data collection, storage, analysis and visualisation.
“This allows our engineers and scientists to deliver greater value to their projects and clients, giving them specialised tools to process big data, for instance, and to facilitate deeper and different insights,” she explains. “Being focused on this fast-moving world of technology, we are also able to keep our colleagues abreast of what developments are interesting and available”.
Among the custom-developed applications developed by the team is a field logger for rock mass characterisation – for quickly capturing data on core samples, according to William Joughin, SRK Consulting (SA) Corporate Consultant and one of the country’s leading Rock Engineering Specialists.
“This replaces a manual logging procedure which traditionally used a pen-and-paper method to log values; this data would need to be manually transferred to spreadsheets before calculations could be conducted,” says Joughin. “The process allowed errors to creep in at different stages – whereas our application places parameters on the input and reduces the room for error”.
More accuracy
The system not only avoids these errors and saves time, but provides instant calculations which can alert the user to any anomaly that might require immediate checking. Traditionally, the manual checking of data for errors is time-consuming and difficult, but is essential in achieving accurate results.
“Through applications like these, we can make our work more efficient while ensuring that data is more reliable and accurate,” he says.
The team was also involved in the development of KinApp, an application that performs kinematic analysis of a range of slope orientations and angles in a dataset – all within a single computation. The results can be represented graphically to instantly identify high risk areas and define slope design limits. Again, it has improved efficiency in routine analyses with commercially available software – reducing computational time by up to 60%.
