Going digital: US Army Corps of Engineers turns $500,000 spend into $500m data asset

Dataforensics unlocked incredible value by moving subsurface data to the cloud, saving years in migration time and 62,700 work hours along the way.

For decades, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has been gathering subsurface data essential to its operations – literally millions of linear feet of it, for thousands of projects, including dams, levees, buildings, bridges and more, scattered around the world.

Unfortunately, the number of databases in which this critical information resided was of a similar scale…

The USACE had accumulated more than 500 separate and disparate database structures, leading to increasing issues with accessibility, collaboration, interoperability and workflow.

As the problems and resulting inefficiencies mounted, USACE made the strategic decision to introduce a global standardisation for its subsurface geotechnical data management and put OpenGround at the heart of its cloud-based enterprise data management.

Before the data could be loaded into OpenGround, it would first need to be cleaned and standardised, and that’s where the magnitude of the exercise became apparent. To do the job by hand would have likely taken years, if not decades. Geotechnical data management company Dataforensics were therefore recruited to develop a software programme that would automate as much of the process as possible, using the APIs for gINT (where much of the historic data resided) and OpenGround.

Apart from giving USACE vastly improved access to its data, and the ability to extract greater value from it, the shift to OpenGround enhanced operations in a number of other ways, such as improved collaboration between offices and contractors.

Interoperability was improved, with data now more easily integrated into software such as Civil3D, Leapfrog Works, GeoStudio and GIS platforms. In particular, the ability to import borehole information into the same platform as geophysical data (in Leapfrog) and a variety of other data (in GIS) greatly improved workflows and the ability to visualise data sets together.

USACE had been primarily using gINT software to manage their borehole data. However, there was no standard in place and each of the district offices was managing their information on separate servers with their own formats and reports.

Shifting to an enterprise level cloud solution allowed USACE to implement a standard database structure across all districts and projects.

To improve the quality of the data, Dataforensics addressed several issues. This included correcting typographical mistakes in date values, fixing data types in scenarios where numeric values were stored in text fields in gINT, and ultimately standardising vast quantities of gINT data. Additionally, there were numerous soil properties from lab test results such as soil classifications, or interpreted results from particle size distribution tests, which were shown on gINT reports, but not actually stored as data in the database.

All but step 3 – which required a geotechnical data specialist competent in gINT and OpenGround – were run autonomously with human oversight to check each step had been completed successfully. Left to a human without autonomous support, Dataforensics calculated that it would have taken 20 times as many hours to reach the end of the task, a saving of 67,000 hours in total.

Going digital and having all subsurface data in a single enterprise database (OpenGround), has helped USACE unlock the true value of a powerful asset.

The improvements in efficiency of personnel using a standardised geotechnical data management system, plus the associated cost and time savings, are substantial. USACE can collaborate more effectively across the supply chain, which saves work hours and increases productivity.

USACE must also deal with critical geotechnical and geological questions that require rapid answers. The ease with which OpenGround allows the access and sharing of information has accelerated the USACE’s responses (for example, once giving within minutes the advice the Air Force required about boreholes near an area they were operating).

Standardised data from contractors means that USACE now gets all the data required for contractors to complete their investigation projects so the datasets they are receiving are more complete (e.g. they include boreholes, lab testing and in-situ testing data), available in a format they can reuse, and extract additional value from in the future.

OpenGround is speeding up the way teams can utilise data in other systems such as AutoCAD Civil 3D, Leapfrog, GeoStudio, PLAXIS, and Excel which means subsurface conditions on their sites can be evaluated more quickly, and robustly with data driven decisions made more confidently, accurately and rapidly.

Moving USACE from a paper-based to a digital agency was a complex task, but one that has left the organisation infinitely better prepared for its future.