Professional Body

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richard_m
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Professional Body

Post by richard_m »

Our industry is a strange one, I can think of no other profession with so little oversight or governance from a professional standards body, I've variously belonged to the “Chartered Institute of X” or the “Royal Institute of Chartered Y” but none of these institutes represent the diverse field of laser scanning and mostly they just care about making money. There’s some governance of standards for heritage/archeo and BIM projects but its hardly unifying or global.

This issue has come to my mind recently as a Client/old friend voiced concerns over there being no body that they can turn to in order to help quantify or assess the abilities of a company they have a scanning tender returned from and they have little understanding of the work themselves.

I reckon my employer is pretty good at what we do, we have a huge internal resource on a global basis and I look around the office at people each with 10+ years of scanning experience. Problem is we are losing out on contracts to inexperienced and unknowledgeable startups who can now rent a scanner for a project after training on YouTube and put together a nonsense tender the Client is not going to understand but has a laughably low bottom line. The Client can be expected to award the contract to the lowest bidder with the best and most naive of intentions. In most instances this situation has no winner, least of all the poor unsuspecting Client. I recently heard of a potential client for a project saying “oh we’ve given up on scanning and the data is just too variable in accuracy for our purposes”. They’re completely wrong but it’s difficult to find a diplomatic way of pointing out the mistake they'd made made at tender stage. More satisfying was recently being given a 2000 scan project to redo after the lowest bidder produced an unuseable dataset, kinda nice to point and laugh at the muppetry on show. The big issue here is these ambitious startups are only doing what they should in a market economy with little or no governance, BUT they ARE hurting our industry at a number of levels.

So whats the solution?

I don’t have that answer. Its easy to say there needs to be a professional standards body that vets scanning companies and assess their potential in a way that can differentiate companies from a potential scanning-client point-of-view, but who and how? Such a body could also form a focal point for the generation and management of standards and specifications, but this would take time and money. Two basic forms spring to mind. Firstly a volunteer led – community entity. This is a nice idea but I see all manner of issues with conflicting commercial interests and a fundamental lack of $$ to ensure a good auditing of member companies and outwards marketing to potential scanning clients. How seriously such potential clients would take such information is debatable. The other option I see is a commercial entity. The closest thing I can think of in existence would be the UK’s The Survey Association:

http://www.tsa-uk.org.uk/for-clients/why-choose-tsa/

The TSA represent most reputable Geomatics companies in the UK but they’re not global and don’t have a scanning specialism as such. Financed by hefty member subscriptions and some advertising. Scanning as an industry would need to include diverse fields such as archeology and forensics and aerial lidar and oil & gas and BIM and and.. but I like their balance of making money while remaining credible and think there’s a lot of good in this kinda format.

Maybe a combination of the two is a better plan, a business entity overseeing memberships, vetting and events etc with a community of members developing standards and specifications. Many clients are desperate to find such standards and specs and would take seriously a body that could supply such knowledge and its members that can be reasonably assured of delivering on it. Whoever is responsible for this business entity is sitting pretty and member subs plus advertising could add up nicely. Lets not forget that this entity through member vetting would hold accurate details of whom in the industry is doing what, where, how, and with what hardware/software and this information could be pimped-out Google style to a few select hardware/software vendors who would, I suspect, pay handsomely for such business intel.

Thinking as I type away my sunday evening here but maybe Mr Marsh and Mr Warren are prime candidates, I'm speaking here of two guys I've never met and know little about but looking around the advertising content surrounding this forum they've got the business accumen.. Maybe its time you guys stopped screwing about with this forum and seized the bigger opportunity.. :shock:

Realistically, the alternative is an existing pseudo-related body figures out what we do then sees the opportunity and starts a decent spin-off from their core business to address this potential.

Someone please add something to this concept, I'm typed-out..

Richard.
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Re: Professional Body

Post by jamesworrell »

There is a body here .. Surveyors' Board of [X] .. where X = your state in Australia.

The question though arises .. is scanning .. surveying?

The Boards variously require degrees, supervised projects etc prior to registration - yet a person can buy a scanner and start doing BIM "surveys", or contour "surveys", or engineering "surveys" - without a surveyor on staff or without the firm holding consulting endorsements etc. I have heard of no enforcement of these requirements - and what is worse, the Surveyors' Boards are created via legislation etc.

Architectural and engineering firms are investing in the equipment and software to do scanning in house - are these firms now getting into surveying without first registering appropriately, extending their professional indemintity insurances etc?

To be perfectly fair, scanning is pretty damn easy and doesn't require a four year undergraduate degree to get great results.

Scanning is the tip of iceberg now though - what of photogrammetry? It is producing data in the +/- 10mm accuracy range - does taking a heap of overlapping photos and putting it through Pix4d aka Recap Pro and selling that data to a client, maybe even generating a DTM, mean you are now surveying?

Just because the data hasn't come from a total station, doesn't mean it is not "surveyed" .. or does it?!

Take a look at the Queensland Surveyors Act 2003 for example .. in the act - surveying services is defined as "surveying services means services relating to carrying out surveys" .. gee thanks, that narrows it down!
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Re: Professional Body

Post by 3DForensics »

In Forensics, the IAFSM is trying to be that group that has some bottom line standards and our main goal is to promote the use of 3D Technologies in Forensics which means the dissemination of knowledge, training, conferences and workshops.

At some point we may end up with a basic level program that helps to train people in various 3D technologies, but at the moment, we have a ways to go before we get there.

I have also heard about people renting scanners for projects and they have completely mucked it up. However, there will be lower cost options for clients as time goes on. Even to the point where they may want to jump into scanning themselves.

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Re: Professional Body

Post by kvanbree »

Richard,

There are certainly scanning tasks such as road building, etc. that require accurate survey data. Any customer that tries to use a scanner to replace a surveyor with a total station in those situations would be asking for trouble.
On the other hand the use of scanning or photogrammetry to document features within buildings often does not require accurate survey data as measurements can be made relative to existing features within the building. We have found that laser scanning can be cost-effective relative to other techniques when documenting things before they are covered up by the construction process.
Take a look at what USIBD (US Institute of Building Documentation - http:\\www.usibd.org) is doing here in the US to help users better understand the accuracy and variability of scanned data. They are mostly a volunteer organization of laser scanning professionals and look to membership fees to help offset their costs. I don't know if they have plans to expand their reach to Europe but it may be worth asking.

Thanks for your post,
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Re: Professional Body

Post by jamesworrell »

For what it is worth .. where we have used a total station (reflectorless) and scanner together on jobs (C10 in these instances) .. we usually get within a few mm between them in the resultant data points - certainly over the shorter range stuff (<75m).

On the control we are always within single digit mm - z's are usually even better than the x/y. It still amazes me.

My argument is that scanning is surveying - perhaps a very narrow and to some extent specialised version. We deliver or derive "surveys" from point cloud all the time. And what is a survey these days?

Replacing a surveyor with a non-surveyor on the other hand ... and this goes back to clients understanding the skills of the operator .. brings doubt into control network topology, long back/short front .. adjustments, instrument setup .. even just understanding the capabilities of the instrument itself. A lot of this is survey technique - a bit more than hitting "go" and hoping for the best with some cloud-to-cloud magic when you get back to the office.

Give a "monkey" a total station and see how you go ;-p

Client education is something else - we had a spec the other day that required 2mm accuracy from the resultant model - on multiple building fascades, roads, footpaths - over an area of about 2km of road to give an idea.
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Re: Professional Body

Post by Jamesrye »

A lot of this is survey technique - a bit more than hitting "go" and hoping for the best with some cloud-to-cloud magic when you get back to the office.
This bothers me more than anything else. You can work really fast if you just use cloud to cloud, but you wont know how accurate your data really is without independent control. Understanding some surveying issues - in particular the propagation of errors is crucial.

Clients misunderstanding the accuracy achievable in scanning is very common, but it isn't limited to laser scanning. Doing some setting out at a solar farm the other day, I asked the engineer how accurately he needed the flags - the answer, with a straight face was "well, I want them exactly in the right place, so 0mm I guess!". What can you say to that?
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Re: Professional Body

Post by Matt Young »

I would love to be a laser scanning consultant. With 16 years experience in scanning/surveying, 3D modelling and general CAD - I could bring a lot. Trouble is that I have all of that experience but no consulting experience, and no idea how to start something like that.
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Re: Professional Body

Post by jedfrechette »

richard_m wrote:Scanning as an industry would need to include diverse fields such as archeology and forensics and aerial lidar and oil & gas and BIM and and..
I think this is what makes any generic "scanning" organization a tough sell. This forum represents only a small corner of what could reasonably be called laser scanning, and still, I have a hard time imagining a set of useful standards and practices that could be applied to the wide variety of projects discussed here. Start adding in things like mobile and aerial scanning or metrology that are rarely brought up here and the task gets even harder.

I think each industry will ultimately need to define their own standards, as USIBD and IAFSM are doing. It's easy for those of us in the trenches to forget that the data itself is not what's important. What's important is how that data will be used, and the end-users need to be the ones who ultimately decide what levels of accuracy and precision are adequate for their needs.

It's always unfortunate to hear about projects that go sideways, but just like there are bad or inexperienced accountants and lawyers and plumbers out there; you'll also find bad scanning companies.
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Re: Professional Body

Post by Matt Young »

I think it's a bit hard on the smaller companies to label them as bad scanning companies. If there is pressure to use laser scanning in order to keep up then scanning will be used. Manufacturers come across to new users with a very positive view (why wouldn't they) - but this can lead to people thinking it's easy to do. I encourage people to jump in at the deep end and learn from mistakes, but advise not to do it on a live project.
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Re: Professional Body

Post by jedfrechette »

Matt Young wrote:I think it's a bit hard on the smaller companies to label them as bad scanning companies.
I totally agree, small does not equal bad (and not just because I represent one of those companies). I would also argue that it is those small hungry companies who aren't afraid to experiment, and occasionally fail, that will ultimately drive this industry forward by challenging the status quo and doing innovative things.
Matt Young wrote:Manufacturers come across to new users with a very positive view
Matt Young, the master of understatement.
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