Optioneer Product Update: Winter 2023

Our Continuum Industries product experts have been tirelessly innovating to bring you a suite of new features to enhance the effectiveness of your project planning processes.

These latest updates have been designed to optimise your strategic planning and design phases, leading to more robust and informed decision-making.

Ready to find out what's new? Let's get unwrapping…🎁

Easily select the most suitable sites for your project.

Site selection (for substations, landfalls, and anything else!)

Optioneer's latest site selection feature streamlines the process of identifying the best locations for your project.

By intelligently automating the analysis of geographical, environmental and regulatory factors (to name a few), Optioneer can efficiently pinpoint the most suitable sites to meet your specific project requirements.

This advanced tool not only significantly cuts down on time and costs associated with manual research and preliminary surveys, but also facilitates the early identification of viable sites, preventing unnecessary expenditure on extensive site investigations.

With this addition, we're simplifying your decision-making process, allowing you to select the most suitable sites with greater efficiency and confidence.

Just define the search area and the required footprint, and you can get selecting!

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉  Drastically cut down time needed to select optimal sites for project-specific developments using Optioneer’s advanced site selection automation.

👉  Minimise risks related to costs and permitting by identifying viable site options earlier in the process.

👉  Strengthen your decision-making by using Optioneer's AI algorithms, which precisely analyse every constraint to ensure you select the best sites.

Quickly generate and compare corridor options.

Early Stage Corridor Exploration

In the initial stages of project planning, it's crucial to adopt a strategy that avoids premature commitments to specific routes, which can lead to stakeholder concerns or unnecessary revisions. To address this, we developed this early-stage corridor exploration feature.

Unlike traditional routing methods that rush towards defining a single 'best line', this new capability allows you to quickly generate and compare multiple corridors. Each corridor offers a range of routes within certain percentages
(1, 3, 5, 10, 20%) of an optimal path.

This strategic overview not only provides a comprehensive understanding of route possibilities but also sensitively navigates the early stages of planning, reducing the risk of early missteps or stakeholder concerns.

With this tool, you can gain deeper insights into potential bottlenecks and constraints across corridor options and quickly identify areas requiring detailed exploration, facilitating a more nuanced comparison of routes. This is particularly crucial in contexts with limited data or high uncertainty.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Strategically explore multiple corridors for a more sensitive and comprehensive overview of route options, avoiding premature commitments.

👉 Enhance early-stage project planning with a broader perspective that acknowledges potential bottlenecks and constraints, reducing risks of stakeholder disapproval.

👉 Efficiently refine and update route choices in response to evolving data and stakeholder feedback, ensuring a more adaptable planning process.

Maximise savings and minimise effort with intelligent infrastructure asset selection.

Cost-efficient asset allocation

This feature streamlines asset placement planning by enabling you to rank and prioritise assets, such as wood poles or steel towers, based on their cost. With this input, Optioneer can intelligently place the most cost-efficient type of infrastructure at each point along a route, based on your preferences.

By focusing on unit costs, this feature helps simplify and speed up decision-making while ensuring that asset placement is both financially efficient and optimised for your project's specific needs.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Drastically reduce costs through budget-conscious asset placement.

👉 Enhance financial forecasting with greater accuracy and confidence, enabling more effective budget allocation.

👉 Significantly reduce selection time by utilising intelligent automation to quickly identify the most suitable asset choices.

Optimise decision-making with comprehensive themed resistance maps.

Resistance maps for specific constraint themes

Unlike conventional, broad-stroke mapping, this new feature allows you to generate multiple distinct resistance maps, each tailored to specific stakeholder perspectives or themes.

These maps collate a multitude of project constraints, represented through detailed GIS layers, into a singular, intuitive visual narrative. This then highlights areas of significant resistance or risk to construction, visualising ‘Environmental Impact’, ‘Technical Risk’, and ‘Community Impact’ through separate, but interlinked maps.

Each map offers a nuanced view of the challenges and resistances faced by specific stakeholder groups, enabling you to more easily understand and compare potential obstacles. This feature allows for more comprehensive project planning and trade-off discussions, ensuring that every stakeholder's concerns are visually and quantitatively represented.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Dive deeper into specific project themes like environmental impact or community impact, ensuring a more targeted and effective analysis.

👉 Confidently justify corridor-level decisions to mitigate public resistance and enhance project viability.

👉 Gain a better understanding of your constraints with clear visuals, helping to grasp complex routing challenges more thoroughly.

Unlimited linking and labelling.

Unlimited linking and tagging

This new capability has unlocked another level of interactive data navigation in Optioneer. By simply using the "@" symbol in any text field, you can effortlessly tag and connect various elements like people, items, comments, and more within your project.

This feature isn't just about ease of navigation—it's a tool to reveal hidden connections and contexts. By clicking on a tag, you're instantly transported to a specific linked point, line, polygon, or saved view. For example, you could tag a specific area of concern for your team to review. With this interactive data navigation, you can quickly understand the bigger picture and understand how individual elements interlink to form a cohesive whole, for better, more collaborative decision-making.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Expose connections by visualising how different project elements are interrelated, providing a clearer understanding of your project's structure.

👉 Provide instant context by sharing links that offer immediate insight into specific data points, aiding in quick decision-making and problem-solving.

👉 Break down complex information into manageable parts, making it easier to navigate and comprehend.

Categories and labels (for points, lines and polygons!)

You can now create and display labels on all geospatial features, such as points (like specific locations or coordinates), lines (such as roads, rivers, or boundaries), and polygons (areas that define regions like cities, lakes, or property boundaries).

Additionally, you can group geospatial features, data layers and results into project-specific categories for intuitive navigation and organisation of the map, for example, “environmental hazards” or “access routes”.

This easy-to-use feature enables you to quickly identify key features directly on the map, ultimately contributing to more efficient project management.

👀 Coming soon…

Users will soon have the option to customise label styles and choose alternative label contents, like 'available capacity' or 'area', instead of just the feature name. This added flexibility will cater to more diverse project needs and user preferences.‍

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉  Enhance project clarity by using custom labels and categories as a visual aid to improve project comprehension.

👉 Streamline map navigation and organisation by grouping items into project-specific categories.

👉  Save time on map interpretation and analysis with easy identification of key geospatial features.

Introducing Single Sign-On: Streamlined & secure access.

Single sign-on

You can now access Optioneer directly through your organisation's single sign-on system!

Or, if you are new to Optioneer, you can skip the usual setup and dive right into your project. With just your enterprise email address, you can enjoy a safer and more straightforward way to access Optioneer, enhancing both security and convenience.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Use your existing enterprise account credentials, like Microsoft or Google Workspace, for a quick and secure login to Optioneer, eliminating the need for multiple usernames and passwords.

👉 Enhance security and compliance by aligning your access to Optioneer with your enterprise-grade security standards.

👉 Streamline onboarding for new users with immediate access through their existing corporate accounts.

Standardise configurations across your projects.

Configuration Templates

You can now copy your 'template' project configurations and apply them to other projects. For example, you can transfer your pre-defined cost and technical parameters for a 400kV line, or an 800mm diameter pipeline, from one project to another.

This not only significantly reduces the time and effort required to initiate new projects, but also fosters a standardised, best-practice approach within your organisation. By enabling quick setup and easy adaptation to specific project needs, this feature transforms how your team initiates and aligns their projects for greater operational efficiency, traceability and collaborative consistency.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉 Significantly reduce the time and effort needed for project initiation, allowing your team to focus on core priorities.

👉 Maintain consistency and best practices by easily transferring pre-defined configurations from one project to another.

👉 Boost operational efficiency by utilising ready-to-use configurations, eliminating the need for time-consuming custom setups.

Select and save the metrics that matter the most.

Saved Metrics

Saved metrics enable you and your team to select, store, and align on key data points vital to your project. This feature is not just for data storage, but for fostering consistency and cohesion across your team. By grouping and saving key metrics, such as those relating to ‘social impact’ or ‘environmental impact’, everyone works with the same understanding and focus, enhancing collaborative decision-making.

This tool streamlines the process of filtering, analysing, and retrieving different metrics. It's designed to be straightforward for both technical and non-technical team members, enabling them to access and utilise essential project data efficiently and concentrate on the most relevant and reliable metrics. This focus is crucial for making informed, data-backed decisions.

💡 Why is this a game-changer?

👉  Accelerate data analysis and decision making: Quickly access and analyse the most pertinent metrics, enhancing efficiency and speeding up project workflows.

👉  Simplify complex information: Enable users with varying technical expertise to easily understand and utilise crucial project data, democratising access to data insights.

👉  Enhance collaboration and consistency: Share tailor-made metric views with team members, ensuring everyone works with the same relevant data, fostering collaboration and consistency across your project.

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