How is everyone delivering data to their clients?

[NDS-Trevor]

I’m curious how most of you are handling data delivery right now. Are you just dropping everything in a Google Drive or Dropbox link, or do you have another system in place?

When we started National Drone Services, the idea was to build a service provider with a nationwide network of FAA-licensed pilots (Yes, like a flyguys/zeitview, but with the intent of actually paying our pilots fair rates). Our core clients were going to be in construction and property management, and we needed a way to deliver data like panoramas, site overview imagery, and orthomosaics in a format that added value and made sense to them. The challenge with the DSP industry as a whole isn't flying drones (that's really easy) - it's delivering your data to clients in a way that provides value. Sending thousands of raw images through Dropbox or Google Drive doesn't cut it. Because of that, we ended up building our own delivery platform, originally just to solve our own problem.

Now we’re pivoting NDS into more of a SaaS platform so other DSPs can use it the same way. It’s set up to:

• Let you organize your deliverables into clean folders
• View standard images, 360 panos, and videos
• Generate orthomosaics (As long as your imagery is suitable)
• Add annotations onto images for inspection purposes and export reports on those
• Use a timeline feature by adding extra captures to the same job for progress tracking
• Compare orthos to satellite or other captures of that job
• Easily share everything to your customer and generate zip downloads

Since it was purpose-built for our own workflow as a service provider, I think it probably lines up with what a lot of you are dealing with too. Happy to answer any questions!

 

[adm_geomatics]

It depends on the client. Some want the raw unedited photos to cloud storage, some want them uploaded to a cloud processing platform like DroneDeploy and some order the whole package and need maps, contours and maybe some volumetrics. These are all PDF's and TIFF's. Very rarely but some do want the point cloud, DEM and maybe the mesh. My goal is to provide a platform so that the client can see and analyze the point cloud and including quick TIN's so they can do there own volumetrics. All in an effort to cut down on the reporting and takeoffs I have to do. This would require the ability to upload and ortho, DEM and LAS/LAZ point cloud. No photogrammetry required. There are several solutions out there but they are far too expensive for smaller operators with 5-10 clients, but I know of several others in the works trying to do exactly this. All the rest offer cloud processing which really jacks up the cost, but they won't offer the plan without it attached.