SERVICES

Pre-sales support, planning, project proposal, costings

Whether your project is for one counter or many, the approach should be the same. Linetop offers free online pre-sales assistance to plan your counters so they match your project objectives.  We can write a proposal (an illlustrated methods statement) to set out what is being bought, how and where it is to be installed and by whom, any extras like on-site training for client staff, so as to cost the project deliverables. Any charge for working up the project definition documents depends on the job size. Planning generally relies on digital photos emailed on to which Linetop’s ideas are drawn.  It may need several exchanges of photos with clients if the best solution is not at first obvious. We may also ask clients to measure dimensions of railings, posts, fencing, to select an RAL paint colour, so that custom boxes for outdoors furniture will fit together precisely on the day and match their surroundings.  Please plan counters for new buildings at their design stage, especially for complex doors. For larger or regional-scale projects, it may be better to pay us to visit all your sites and meet local staff there, developing a plan face to face, taking any measurements ourselves. Charges are based on time and travel incurred from our base in South Wales. We have agents in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic and Scotland and some EU countries who can also provide all these local assessment services.

Installation work and client staff training on site

Installing counters is often done by Linetop staff and a handover to client staff is done either at the end of that visit or perhaps a month later when a fair amount of real data will be available to view.  Costs are again related to time, travel, and consumables like building materials. If client staff act as ‘helpers’ then they will ‘learn on the job’ from the Linetop team and thus be able to install similar counters by themselves in the future, or make any repairs by fitting a spare part supplied by post, or to move a counter to a new location confidently.  Another approach is for Linetop staff to install a couple of counters on the client site as ‘how-to’ demonstrations, then client staff with the knowledge will install the remaining counters later themselves. Installing vehicle counters on site roads or car parks is a technical job with a signifi- cant Health & Safety aspect.  It will reduce direct costs if a client staff member would manage the road and any traffic while a Linetop staff member installs the sensor. Road works like loop sensors are a two-person task.  Health and Safety issues will have been addressed and resolved at the project planning and costing stage.

Data collections and report writing

The training described above makes client staff self-sufficient to run their counters themselves - but some projects may need to contract some or all of the aspects of ongoing visitor monitoring to Linetop. For example in Wales, Linetop runs most government forestry and national nature reserve counters as a total service which includes the data collection, inspection, maintenance and writing of reports. Another operational model is for the client’s staff to maintain their counters, by changing the batteries and flash memory periodically, then sending the used flash memory cubes to a colleague at a regional centre who will read them and compile a single report covering a number of geographically-dispersed sites. Alternatively they can post their used cubes to Linetop for report writing. This is a good way to work where the client staff are more the ‘outdoors’ type of people rather than ‘analytical’. Linetop will view and comment on data received from clients by email attachment. Every run of a counter at each site (comprising say a few months of hourly raw data) results in a single small file on the PC. These are assembled into complete site-year files by EcoPC which is Linetop’s analytical PC app.  So it is easy to share or pool results simply by sending these small files to colleagues as email attachments or to Linetop for comment if something looks odd or is suggesting an operational issue that needs further investigation or at least a rational explanation.