Top Six Spike Applications for Municipalities and Counties

The adoption of Spike by municipalities and counties is growing quickly, and it’s no surprise considering how many different applications there are for Spike. Many of these applications require the collection of both location and measurement data, and the ability to update these assets in a geodatabase.

Since Spike is cost-effective and easy to use, it’s also easy to deploy to those who aren’t surveyors or engineers. Not to mention that with Spike’s integration with Esri’s Survey123 for ArcGIS®, the inspecting, assessing, and reporting of these assets and features is as easy as filling out a mobile form in the field, taking a photo, and automatically updating a geodatabase.
Oftentimes, the GIS department acquires a Spike for use on a particular project, such as annual signage inventory, and has great success and a positive ROI on the project. Following the success of their first project, they are on the search for other applications where Spike could be used to lower costs and speed up completion time of a project.

We have compiled a list of the top six applications where Spike can be deployed across local government departments with immediate success:

1. Transportation – Applications for Spike in transportation include signage inventory and road maintenance. Counties are required to maintain databases of all ground signs, and equipped with Spike, road departments can measure and locate signs, and have a photo verifiable record for their databases. Road maintenance can benefit from taking measurements for material estimates and for measuring and locating culverts and bridges.

2. Code Compliance and Inspections – Spike is an essential tool for code compliance and conducting inspections, because Spike enables inspectors to measure and locate hard-to-reach objects. They can verify new construction and building improvements by quickly measuring heights and widths, and use the photo record for code enforcement. Inspectors are oftentimes not given ladders or allowed to leave the ground to measure taller features, and Spike enables them to measure from the ground by taking a photo from their smartphone or tablet.

3. Emergency Management – Spike belongs in the toolbox for emergency management, and has been used many times for disaster response and relief. During the assessment of disasters, damaged assets are typically difficult to access and difficult to document. Spike enables officials to catalog the location of damages, estimate materials needed for repair, or even complete FEMA funding application documentation – all from a safe distance.

4. Facilities Management – Spike can be used to measure, locate, assess, and report both interior and exterior features of properties, simply by taking a photo of the feature. Examples of how Spike can be used for facility improvements and repair include graffiti removal to energy efficiency measurements and parking lot light poles.

5. Assessments – Assessors frequently are unable to access the property they are required to measure and value. Equipped with Spike, assessors can measure the lengths of exterior walls using Spike’s point-to-point measurement capability. These measurements can then be used to develop a floorplan, and the photos used as a photo record.

6. Asset Management – Asset managers can easily catalog assets and update their databases by using Spike. From a single photo taken with Spike and a smartphone or tablet, asset managers can capture the GPS location of the asset, a photo verifiable record, and any measurements needed. All of this data, as well as photos, can then be uploaded into a geodatabase for easy reference and record-keeping.

To learn more about Spike, and how Spike integrates with ArcGIS, click here. If you have questions about Spike, please email us.