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NSW is famous for its oysters. To ensure compliance with environmental, health and safety regulations, oyster leases along the breadth of the State’s coast and estuaries are regularly inspected by NSW Department of Primary Industries Fisheries Officers. Until recently, the details of inspections were recorded on quadruplicate paper forms. To improve the efficiency of recording and reporting of inspections, NSW Department of Primary Industries contracted Spatial Vision to develop a mobile solution enabling officers to capture inspection details in the field and for these details to then be easily integrated with the Fisheries corporate database.

Ian Powell, NSW Department of Primary Industries’ Project Manager, says that the vision for NSW Department of Primary Industries’ Fisheries Aquaculture Compliance section is a linked and secure system of data recording and management with remote access that improves efficiency of business operations and reporting to clients. To this end, Spatial Vision developed a sophisticated field inspection application that operates on a handheld device running ESRI’s ArcPad GIS software. GPS is used to position the correct oyster lease on screen. Once the officer returns to their office, they synchronise their new inspection data with a corporate database and generate an inspection report to send to the lessee and the aquaculture permit holder.

According to Ian Powell, the field inspection application will provide considerable time savings as transcription of details on to reports and databases will no longer be necessary. More importantly, the Aquaculture Compliance section will be better able to strategically report on the inspections completed by location.

Ishara Kotiah, Spatial Vision’s lead developer for the project, says the major challenge in building effective mobile applications is to design them to work in concert with business processes and meet user expectations. Ishara worked closely with user representatives to understand the business context for the application. The mobile inspection application will now be used in the field with a staged introduction along the NSW coast.