UK Video Tour | Staffordshire County Council

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It’s the accuracy and time element of it — it’s incredibly easy to use. It’s intuitive. Everything is in the place that you’d expect it to be. It is as if it’s been designed by someone that actually maintains assets.

The ability to actually have one single source of entry is key. Information is out there in open source, but what KaarbonTech allows you to do is pull in open source data such as woodland data but also water bodies. So if you go on to data.gov, you can look at the river network, the tributaries, the DRN data, but KaarbonTech allows you to pull that onto one. So having everything in one place, understanding the conditions, also the risk, and knowing if there are any hotspots that have been identified — we can see exactly where our assets are. New assets that have been installed can go on to KaarbonTech easily with a couple of clicks.

I find the KaarbonTech system is very easy to use. It’s intuitive and it’s very easy to drive with minimal training. It has very much enhanced our ability to desktop study so that we know what we’re working with and what physical infrastructure is on the ground. Clicking onto an asset — a manhole, a pipeline — you can get all of the information: the last time it was surveyed, the condition, videos and photographs.

There are several cases where what it was believed the infrastructure did and its configuration was totally different to what KaarbonTech identified for us. And that, in itself, made us understand why flooding was occurring.

Where the future in water management is really exciting — it’s changing. We have to now really think about the four pillars: water quality, quantity, amenity and biodiversity. If we don’t record that effectively on a system, and how specific assets manage these four pillars, we are not completing our statutory requirements.

We need to make sure that an application can start recording accurately and effectively developments that have installed blue-green solutions, but also look at what we’re doing ourselves as mitigation. It records the information accurately in line with the four pillars and also sustainable drainage. That’s what we’re working with KaarbonTech on at the moment.

I would describe KaarbonTech as a resource multiplier. The correctness of information enables me to do a lot more than a traditional project manager would be able to do in the same period of time. It’s not just what the application does — it’s the support that we have in the background. You can ring up the support team, they’re there, they’re helpful, and our key customer service manager is always available to give us guidance and support. That’s the beauty of using something like KaarbonTech.

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UK Video Tour | Staffordshire County Council

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