Dredge Dash: A real-time dredging project management tool harnessing Power BI
The "Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviros" meetup group is all about sharing tips, tricks and hacks for analysing, visualising and communicating environmental data. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the key take-aways from the sessions, to help with sharing knowledge, empowering others and creating a strong data culture across our community.
September 2023: Session summary
Dredging projects are critical to maintaining or establishing navigational access to ports, waterways and maritime infrastructure. Engagement and reporting to various internal and external stakeholders are required for these unique projects. Dredging project data collection and reporting can be timely and cumbersome.
Swash selected Power BI to develop an interactive dredging dashboard to provide a ‘one stop shop’ for monitoring dredging projects. Real-time data could be monitored in the form of vessel location and camera images, as well as tracking historical activities through vessel track plots and heat maps. Dredge Dash eliminates the need for manually creating daily, weekly and close out reports in MS Word and PDF format in order to streamline internal and external stakeholder communications.
This session focused on many different tools used across the Microsoft Stack to bring all this information together into one Power BI dashboard, including: Logic Apps; Azure Functions and Azure SQL DB; SharePoint Excel files; and Power BI (the hero) which brings it all together, including our favourite custom visuals Icon Map, Map Box and HTML Content to bring the data to life!
🎦 Check out the full event recording here 🎦
Our Speakers
Damian Snell (Swash Project Delivery) is the Director of Swash Project Delivery. Swash successfully and sustainably delivers dredging and sand management programs, projects and strategies for the benefit of the environment, community, client and regulators.
Damian has over 20-years’ experience as a Program and Project (Construction and Environmental) Management Professional. His career includes experience in both the public and private (consulting) sectors across the Ports and Water Utilities industries. Damian’s strength is his unique skill set across dredging, environmental compliance and large civil projects. Key to the success of these projects is being able to develop strong stakeholder relationships with port operators, regulators, the community, environmental organisations and other government departments to ensure successful delivery of projects and compliance with regulatory conditions.
Damian loves innovation and sees Power BI as a great visual and reporting tool to streamline monitoring and communications between key stakeholders – transparency is key! Dredge Dash is continually being developed and tailored for small to very large dredging projects and programs around Australia.
When not project managing or Power BI-ing (is that a word?), Damian loves going to Coolum beach with the family and trying to keep up with the kids on a Parkrun! Damian is contactable on LinkedIn.
Alice Drummond (DiscoverEI): Alice is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and her passion is using Power BI to bring environmental data to life! Drawing on her background in environmental engineering, Alice works collaboratively with government organisations to turn mountains of data into practical, useful, decision-guiding insights, and gets a real buzz from training the next generation of data champions. Alice is contactable on LinkedIn.
Daniel Marsh-Patrick (DiscoverEI): During his career across the UK and New Zealand, Daniel has been helping drive enterprise-wide solutions through process and software engineering; predominantly through Business Intelligence (BI), data visualisation and software integration. He is extremely passionate about the Microsoft BI stack, particularly Power BI, and has been delivering Power BI solutions since 2014. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, a contributor of free and open-source custom visuals to the Power BI Marketplace, a Power BI Community Super User and regularly presents and blogs on a variety of Power BI subjects. Daniel is also an industry partner with DiscoverEI, transforming environmental data into decisions. Daniel aims to empower people with the knowledge and tools to make their workdays easier by using software and/or common sense to eliminate the tedious bits. He enjoys sharing the knowledge he has gained with anyone that has the inspiration and desire to learn these skills for themselves. Daniel is contactable on LinkedIn.
Sign up now for the meetup here: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/powerbi4enviros - and if you have ideas for a future session then please let us know at info@discoverei.com .
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