This article has been published by OTAR Magazine in July 2021.
More and more people know how universal the UNI-GR1 is, but we do not expect you to know that you can even detect explosives with it. Yet that is exactly what AVG Explosieven Opsporing Nederland (UXO Clearance Netherlands) does. They make the Netherlands safer by combining this device with the WebGIS app from NieuwlandGeo. Time to ask these three parties about this unique combination.
Use by AVG
Menno Abee is a manager at AVG Explosieven Opsporing Nederland: “AVG is a large organization that has existed for 100 years this year and employs approximately 220 people. AVG has infrastructure, transport, building materials, recycling, and UXO clearance departments in both the Netherlands and Germany. Within the whole organization, the explosives branch is a bit of an outsider. We work with ten people at our own office in Kaatsheuvel and eight in the field.
We do not dispose of explosives ourselves, this is reserved for the Explosieven Opruimingsdienst Defensie (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) in the Netherlands. We can carry out the investigation process, from preliminary investigations to risk analyses, and from detection to approaching and securing the explosives found. For this, we use the WebGIS Publisher and WebGIS App from NieuwlandGeo and the marXact UNI-GR1 hardware.”
Joining forces
“What I like about this collaboration with marXact, and therefore also about joining forces for and with AVG, is that we all have our own input. AVG has been using our WebGIS App for a long time and is accustomed to it already. They were still looking for a party for the actual equipment to be able to measure. Then I thought about marXact ”, says Sjaak Dieleman, manager at NieuwlandGeo.
“We once came into contact with each other during a GNSS presentation at the Technical University in Delft. A presentation by Tommy van der Heijden caught my attention, an outsider who just appeared on the market and offered a different perspective than the other people present that day. More competitiveness with other providers, with more user-friendliness for customers as well. That was exactly what AVG needed and had in mind. From that moment on, we were on a roll. ”
Abee: ”Sjaak advised me to contact marXact, because their way of working and the type of company they are, would suit us. After a number of conversations, that turned out to be the case. I did have a couple of requirements, for example about the link between both systems and our detection system, but they were able to meet all of them.”
Letting users decide
Tommy van der Heijden, founder and co-owner of marXact: “What you see with this collaboration, is that we enable organizations such as AVG, to decide how their work process is. In this case, with the NieuwlandGeo software. Our goal is to make digital surveying easy and affordable for anyone working in the field. This works best when you let users decide for themselves what is really easy for them. With handy software and easy-to-use hardware that you can take to the location with you. That’s how you make digital surveying possible for everyone.
That has been the goal since our founding, to let users choose how they survey and integrate that into their work processes to get started right away. More and more companies in the infrastructure sector see this and that is why they choose us. We offer the entire digital survey experience with, among other things, the UNI-GR1, our own cloud environment, and self-developed survey software, but have also established many integrations with other tools and software. This allows you to really choose how you work, the instruments adapt to that choice.”
“And if you cannot resolve it immediately, you can contact support. We have good experiences with help requests at both NieuwlandGeo and marXact with a good response speed and a willingness to really help and support you. That’s great, it allows our teams to continue in the field quickly and make the Netherlands a bit safer, ”Abee concludes.
