Development Assessment at your fingertips

Gone are the days when reviewing and assessing planning and building applications was best done on paper.

Local authorities aspiring to deliver superior customer experience are combining the power of Objective Trapeze with devices that deliver on mobility and collaboration needs, such as the Microsoft Surface range.

From the Surface Go to the Surface Studio, council officers using Trapeze Professional can measure, mark-up, compare and stamp digital plans at an inspection, in a meeting room or at the customer service counter in ways not possible before.

The Surface touchscreens create a tactile experience that is intuitive to users. Planners and building officers can pinch to zoom, pan and scroll to easily navigate lengthy documents at the right level of detail needed.

Andrew Karrasch, Lead Product Designer, says it’s development assessment at your fingertips.

“The Surface brings together the best of both worlds. It allows us to take what used to be an analogue way of looking at plans, to a digital world. So those natural gestures that we use in the real world transfer across to the Surface for our users,” he explains.

Stamping out inefficiencies

For decades, Objective Trapeze has been the enabler for hundreds of councils in Australia, New Zealand and the UK to transition from paper to digital, and there are many benefits to be gained from adopting this modern way of working. It's important not to limit these benefits to only those activities performed at an office desk.

The demands of the job require council staff to also be highly mobile and collaborative, conducting site inspections and attending meetings both on site and within the building, including at the front service counter.

The combination of the intelligent Trapeze Professional software with the intuitive Surface hardware meets these mobility and collaboration needs, coming to life in the hands of users, as described in this Microsoft article.

Need to measure an area, setback or check for potential privacy and overshadowing issues during a site inspection? No problem. Assessment officers can take Trapeze with them for anything that needs to be double-checked.

Want to mark-up PDFs in a meeting or at the customer service counter? It’s never been easier to visually communicate areas of concern with the Surface pen, which can also be used to sign documents by hand, on-screen.

Wish you could compare your version of the approved plans with the developer’s version on site? Trapeze Professional unveils differences between any two documents through pixel by pixel analysis not seen before.

It’s exciting to see forward-thinking customers tap into the latest innovation so planning, building and other teams managing digital plans can serve the community better than ever.

Learn more about Microsoft Surface or Objective Trapeze.