By Fiona Jeffreys
Pushing data from paper to the cloud is the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development’s (DOTD) strategic move to help drive a more resilient transport infrastructure future.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s $146.2 billion infrastructure investment budget for 2025, includes allocated funding for data-driven advancements to support a lasting transportation legacy that benefits the nation and economy for years to come.
In alignment with these goals, and to ensure Louisiana’s transportation infrastructure remains resilient, efficient, and forward-looking, the team at DOTD has successfully migrated geotechnical data from over 2,500 projects to the cloud – paving the way for other North American State DOTs to do the same.
Louisiana’s distinct climate and geology create further challenges with frequent rain, subsidence, and seasonal hurricanes all contributing to soft, swampy soil.
Source: Shutterstock
‘Data is an asset, has value, and should be managed properly,’ said Gavin Gautreau, Senior Geotechnical Research Engineer at LTRC, the research arm of the DOTD.
Drawing on his decade-long experience in the geotechnical private sector and 22 years at LTRC (geotechnical) Gautreau leads his team to improve workflows and drive innovation. His focus is on turning data-driven research into real-world solutions to drive transport infrastructure resilience going forward.
‘The potential of the cloud for fast and secure transfer and storage of geotechnical data, and the evolving capabilities of AI and machine learning, will enhance the future of geotechnical engineering practices, and the transportation industry as a whole,’ said Gautreau.
Establishing a digital road map
DOTD serves the transportation needs of residents, businesses and government partners. This includes the management and development of critical highway, bridge, airport, port, rail and waterway infrastructure.
Like many organisations, they’re under pressure to do more with less. Louisiana’s distinct climate and geology create further challenges with frequent rain, subsidence, and seasonal hurricanes all contributing to the US Southern States soft, swampy soil.
‘We needed long-term insight into Louisiana’s soil conditions,’ said Gautreau. ‘Soil investigations can be expensive, so preserving that data was our first step. Capitalising on that data can be our next step.’
DOTD decided to go from paper to digital a number of years ago, understanding that while paper logs hold valuable geotechnical data, a digital management system maximises historical data for both current and future projects.
‘We established a road map to our destination with a series of goals along the way. Each step, even if minor, helped advance the research and implementation towards the goal of proper geotechnical data management,’ said Gautreau. ‘Having a champion within an organisation to lead this kind of digital effort is key.’
An aerial view of the Leeville to Golden Meadow Bridge project in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana.
Source: Primoris Heavy Civil
A champion for your data-driven cause
Assistant Geotechnical Engineer Administrator, Jesse G Rauser, played a pivotal role in DOTD’s transition from gINT to OpenGround. His end goal was to manage data more efficiently and ensure consistency, reliability, and repeatability in their geotechnical practices.
OpenGround offers cloud-connected geotechnical data management for civil engineering ground investigations and recently achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP®) In Process status.
By leveraging OpenGround’s capabilities, Rauser and the DOTD team streamlined the 2,500-project migration by standardising data formats and centralising geotechnical information. They developed tools to automate boring requests, plot design parameters, and integrate lab data management, significantly reducing manual data entry and plotting time.
‘We need to start thinking of data as an asset rather than something to be stored or archived,’ said Rauser. ‘Also, we want to encourage engineers to start the data management process early and eliminate paper forms. Some people think that the paper log is still very important, but they’re not the ones doing the design.’
The DOTD geotechnical team now recognise the benefits of digitised, centralised data. One immediate efficiency is in site characterisation, because manually plotting data points on graph paper is no longer needed.
‘It used to drive me crazy walking around the office and seeing somebody holding a soil boring log and typing those numbers back into a spreadsheet when another person had already typed in those same data points at some point in the past,’ he said.
DOTD’s Assistant Geotechnical Engineer Administrator, Jesse G Rauser, played a pivotal role in DOTD’s transition from gINT to OpenGround.
Stop spinning your wheels
In OpenGround calculations and visualisations can be generated within minutes of receiving data files, significantly reducing time and cost to the taxpayer.
Consider this: it costs ‘approximately $15,000 per soil boring, and possibly even more nowadays,’ said Rauser of the typical boring and testing needs for a bridge foundation. Preserving the data from these borings is incredibly valuable, as it eliminates the need to revisit the site and drill additional holes. Instead, ‘we can maximise the use of existing information, saving both time and resources.’
‘Our simplistic boring request form, I think easily saves 30 minutes to an hour on every single project and the tools we’ve built to visualise data and for statistical analysis, saves at least an hour per project,’ he said.
‘Without a doubt we’re achieving substantial time savings across our projects simply by having well-organised and accessible data. The tools we’ve developed allow us to save several hours on each project, which, when considered across multiple projects, has significant cumulative impact,’ said Rauser.
‘The benefits keep growing as we continue to load more actual project data, rather than just scanned images or incomplete records.’
The Department is also working with a consultant to develop web-based tools that can consume various input, including data from the OpenGround API, to automate some of the tedious statistical calculations needed to evaluate site variability.
This will help DOTD and their consultants to conform to a specific design methodology while making their work easy to verify.
‘With OpenGround we can easily go in, get all the data and do the statistics in a web browser and simply give that web-based tool to our consultant without them spinning their wheels to do the calculations – it’s all done.’
2500
DOTD projects successfully migrated to the cloud
US$146.2b
US DoT’s infrastructure investment budget for 2025
30
Thirty minutes to one hour saved per project using OpenGround
Becoming a change agent
The transition to OpenGround was not without its challenges. But both Rauser and Gautreau stressed the importance of teams being open-minded to new technologies.
‘Resistance to change was more prevalent for engineers who were more comfortable with traditional methods, but once they started to see the benefits, they became more open to making the move to digital data management,’ said Rauser.
Rauser suggested resistance to change can also come, ‘from a lack of confidence in the permanence of digital data stored in the cloud, compared to tangible paper logs.’
Once people see how a centralised database streamlines project planning, reduces manual data entry, and allows quick independent reviews of engineers’ work, they recognise its benefits.
The DOTD Geotechnical Group is all within Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but Gautreau sees the value of the cloud to help centralise data for other DOTs and companies that have multiple geotechnical offices needing access to their data.
‘OpenGround’s cloud capabilities should help speed and ease the sharing of data across offices. We hope to share data with our contract consultant partners, other Louisiana agencies, and adjacent State DOTs. I would imagine that other State DOTs have similar goals,’ said Gautreau.