Customer Stories

Kuwait's land management department, Kuwait Municipality (KM), requires all landowners to have their boundary surveyed and marked before development. When growth is fast and buildings seemingly shoot up overnight, KM needs to be one step ahead of the landowners to ensure site improvements stay within their boundaries. Thanks to a new mixed software solution, the lengthy process of boundary work has been expedited. overview Location KUWAIT TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS As all surveyors know, performing a boundary survey is seldom as easy as setting monuments at the corners and walking away. In the high-development areas of Kuwait, existing buildings tend to complicate boundary work in two ways: by obstructing GNSS reception during stakeout of an adjoining parcel and—more severely—by exceeding (encroaching) boundary lines. Encroaching features delay new development and can have costly consequences for parties on both sides of the property line. "Often there are parcels attached to buildings from one, two or three sides," says Meshaal Al Arada, Survey Services Supervisor of Kuwait Municipality. "KM wants to check if the neighbors have violations [encroachments]." "KM requested Vision, to develop a system that would enable them to locate and mark parcel coordinates with an accuracy of better than 3cm." said Eid Al-Adwani, General Manager of Vision International, a software solutions company. The new paperless system employs several software solutions, including Trimble Access, which facilitates the data transfer between the field and the main offices. Al-Adwani notes notes that, "Without Trimble Access, none of this is possible." A MIXED SOFTWARE SOLUTION Trimble Access works with an application called the Remote Parcel Validator (RPV), which performs quality control checks in real time. The RPV evaluates several factors to ensure the survey work is done properly and then either approves or rejects the boundary survey based on municipality standards. Items evaluated by the RPV include the functioning status of the equipment, the accuracy of the boundary coordinates as located by the surveyor, and the quality of the GNSS network. If the stakeout coordinates are outside of tolerance or the GNSS constellation is poor, the RPV will freeze the transaction and allow the supervisor to intercede remotely. Alternately, if the RPV determines the job was well done, it prompts the parcel release form, which the surveyor and client then sign digitally on the data collector. Trimble Access delivers the form instantly to the main office for final approval. Once a 15-day process, the boundary survey and parcel handover is now performed in a single afternoon under ideal conditions.

• Cover