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Introduction

There are 4 million holes and excavations dug in the UK every day with 60,000 utility strikes estimated to cost the UK economy £2.4 billion.
The UK did not have a single platform that allowed consistent access to data related to underground assets. The National Underground Asset Register was a project to combine all underground assets in one place and to improve the efficiency and safety of underground works by creating a digital map of underground pipes and cables.
Asset owners (regularly) upload their records to be held centrally in the NUAR platform.

Challenges

Lack of access to comprehensive information could cause workers to dig through live cables and pipes with risk to life. Accidental strikes can cause project delays, increase road closures and congestion, negatively impacting local economies.
Every asset owner holds data in different repositories, formats and locations, and has different ways of capturing and storing data, making quality inconsistent. The NUAR platform needs to accept all these formats in varying qualities across a national scale, while remaining easy to use and intuitive for asset owners.
To ensure NUAR held the most up to date information and uploading your data didn’t become a specialist job, the upload process needed to be easy, intuitive and without obstacles.

Solutions

We took two of our off the shelf products, 1Integrate & 1Data Gateway to accommodate the solution.

1Integregate is our no-code rules-based integration tool for spatial and non-spatial data. The rules we configured meant only accurate information entered the asset register whilst upload was easy and intuitive for the end user.
1Data Gateway allows full supply chain management to check and confirm results as they go through the process.
The use of integrated APIs means the latest versions of data can be extracted and loaded to the NUAR with minimal human intervention.

Results

The upload process of the NUAR has been met with resounding positive feedback. Users ranging from weekly to bi-yearly have expressed how easy the upload process was every time they used it.
The platform has been able to ingest national sized datasets in varying formats and qualities with ease and without slow processing times, making the user experience much smoother and without obstacles.
Asset owners receive a benefit from loading their data in with quality and compliance reports generated through the upload process. Reports can highlight duplicates, non-compliances and poor quality to name a few.

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