By Jim Logan

When finished, the FedEx building at the sprawling Dominguez Tech Center in Carson, CA, will require more than 1 million square feet of grading. And with 750,000 square feet of slabs and parking lots, the grading has to be precise; even a tiny error could cost the concrete contractor thousands of dollars.

Photo: Jim Logan

Jim Smith of Calco Grading sets a SiteShape control unit on his motor grader.

So when KCB Builders, a concrete contractor based in Long Beach, CA, needed a grader, it turned to Jim Smith, owner of Calco Grading Inc. Like KCB, Smith uses the 3D Profiler System from Somero Enterprises that uses a geodimeter and sophisticated software to quickly create a 3D map of a job site. “They won’t let another blade on the job,” says Smith, whose company is based in Bellflower, CA. “If it does not have 3D it does not come on the job.”

Smith’s 3D system is part of SiteShape, Somero’s new package of technologies that allows a contractor to quickly profile a site, create a 3D map of the area, and then control a grader with fine precision.

Photo: Jim Logan

Smith sets up the SiteShape geodimeter in preparation for profiling a job site.

Photo: Jim Logan

Smith uses a prism and a laptop to set nodes for the software that will create a 3D map.

The reason for KCB’s pickiness is simple, says Troy Blankenship, a superintendent with the company. In an industry where time is money, SiteShape saves both. “He can take a profile of exactly what I’m doing and boom, we get it done,” Blankenship says. “It saves a ton of labor and a ton of time.”

On a warm winter day between rains, Smith was preparing to grade an area of about 100,000 square feet. Using SiteShape and his John Deere 772CH motor grader, he says he’ll do the job—including creating a 3D map (called a profile) and grading—in a day. And he’ll do it alone.

For Smith, that’s the real value of SiteShape: it allows him to do jobs quickly and without employees. He can survey the site in about an hour, download the information to a ruggedized laptop, and be grading in minutes.

“I don’t have to have a CAD expert on the payroll and have him work till midnight to get me a profile made,” he says. “I just come out here myself, and I can actually turn this into a one-man operation. I can actually come out here, set my points that I need, retrieve them with a geodimeter and a laptop, make my surfaces, put it in the blade, and start grading with no help from anybody else.

“The way we used to do it before,” Smith notes, “we would have a grader operator … we’d have the operator, and three guys out here setting intermediate hubs on 30-foot grids, which is very time-consuming. When you look at the size of this job site, you say, ‘That is a lot of hubs,’ and it is. It would probably take a three-man crew all day long to hub this 100,000-square-foot piece.”

The FedEx project began in July 2004, but heavy rains have wreaked havoc on every contractor’s schedule, including Smith’s. Still, he’s managed to grade around 750,000 square feet, with about 150,000 square feet remaining. On that dry day in February he demonstrated how he’s able to work so quickly.

The first step was a site survey. On a tall tripod he set up a geodimeter, a robotic Trimble Total Station that Somero calls an Automatic Tracking System (ATS). The geodimeter is the key to mapping a job. Once set up, Smith, carrying a laptop in a harness and a 360-degree prism that acts as a target for the geodimeter, creates nodes or hubs in key spots for his grid. A radio hanging from his belt receives measurements from the geodimeter and sends those to the laptop.

After he’s created enough nodes—the number necessary depends on the size and geometry of the site—he creates a color-coded profile using Somero’s Profile Maker software on a Windows-based laptop. The profile can be done in as little as 10 minutes. From there all that’s needed is to put the laptop in the cab and start grading. The computer calculates the location of the blade based on the grid and raises or lowers it as required. Somero says SiteShape will provide accuracy down to an eighth of an inch.

Photo: Jim Logan

Smith has his SiteShape attached to a John Deere 772CH motor grader— his only machine.

“I can get it within an eighth of inch,” Smith says, “but it takes a little time and practice to do that. If you go through here in first gear, you watch your machine and see how its working, and don’t push it, you can get unbelievable tolerances. The nice thing about that is … that machine never has to stop and wait. It never has to stop and wait for a hub to get put in; it never has to stop and wait for a hub to get uncovered or a feather to be replaced. You are constantly on grade. It’s very fast, very efficient. We’ve doubled our square footage per day in every case.

For Smith, who actually persuaded Somero to apply SiteShape to graders after seeing it in action on a laser screed two years ago, the technology has completely transformed his business. He has no employees other than a secretary and just one grader.

“As far as I’m concerned it’s the greatest tool that’s come along for the grading contractor since they invented the tractor,” he says. “It’s the greatest thing I’ve seen. It’s allowing me to do things now that I would never have been able to do without that.”

Smith, who concedes he’s no technophile, has managed to adapt the system so that he can cut curb grade. “It really wasn’t made to do that,” he says, “but I figured out a way to kind of dummy up the profile to where I can go in and cut curb grade, which eliminates one person going in front of me checking grade, or going behind me. And that’s a very slow process. With SiteShape doing my curb grades for me now I don’t need that guy, so when I’m roughing that out I can do it in second or third gear. And then I put it in first gear and boom, I never have to stop for anything. That gives you total production. It gives 60 minutes of production out of your machine every hour.”

If Smith sounds like something of an evangelist for SiteShape, he can be excused. He says it’s given him a big edge in a highly competitive market. With no employees and just the one machine, his overhead is minimal and the headaches that come from having employees are but a memory. It’s also allowed him to be selective in the jobs he takes.

“What’s an advantage for me is if I’ve got 10, 15, 20 people working for me I’ve got to make sure they’re working every day,” he says. “In California it’s incredibly hard to get good people, so if you’re not working them every day they’re gonna go to a company that is. So it gives me the luxury, being a small contractor, that I can take the work as I need it instead of making sure that I get a whole bunch of it lined up. When you’re in a situation like that, sometimes you’re taking jobs you really don’t want to take just to keep the people going. I take the jobs that I like, the ones I can handle and the ones that are tailor-made perfectly for my situation.”

Smith predicts that SiteShape, which was rolled out officially only recently, will eventually be used by as much as 50% of grading contractors within five years. The reason is simple economics. “SiteShape has given me the advantage to go after bigger jobs like this, and being able to bid competitively against the people that have more employees,” he says. Those without it, he reasons, will be forced to catch up.

It won’t happen overnight for a couple of reasons. One, a full system runs about $100,000. “It’s a large investment, especially for a small company like me,” Smith concedes. “I’ve got a $100,000 attachment on a blade that’s worth $120,000. When you start talking about $100,000, it’s like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ I was that way too, but I’d just sold a bunch of equipment and I needed a tax break, so it wasn’t that hard for me.”

The other reason is subtler: resistance to change. The dirt-moving business, though filled with sophisticated machines, hasn’t exactly rushed to embrace high technology. That’s partly because, Smith reasons, the majority of owner/operators are middle-aged men with no great love of or familiarity with computers.

“I’m not what you’d call computer literate,” he says, “and I don’t care to be. Now, you take these old foremen, these old operators out in the field, and you stick a computer in their face they’re not gonna have any part of it. For one thing, they don’t want to admit how dumb we are because we don’t know anything about them. And we don’t want to learn.” Younger operators, on the other hand, take to the system with ease, he says. “I can take any one of these 25-, 30-year-old kids out here and I can introduce them to SiteShape and give them a couple of days training and they’ll pick it up so quick they’ll be off and running.”

Smith, who is in his 50s, insists the technology is not that difficult to learn. Indeed, the process of setting nodes and creating a profile appears relatively straightforward. Anybody who can send e-mail and surf the Web likely has the skills to use SiteShape—even, he says, “a guy my age. After you get past the part where it overwhelms you, it’s basically simple. It’s common sense; it’s things you understand. You just do what the program likes to do.”

TR Kunesh, Somero’s director of marketing, says the company is stressing the bottom line to contractors. “The early adopters are going to make a lot of money on this,” he says. “That’s our first target. Our second target are guys like Jim there, small owner/operators out there doing this work (who) don’t want to hire a crew … don’t want that overhead on their back. They want to run it on their own and make money.”

And that’s exactly what Smith has done, Since having SiteShape installed, he says, he’s graded about 10 million square feet. The money’s good, but he wouldn’t mind a break. “It gets to be a problem; last year it about killed me,” he says. “I was working Saturdays, I worked Sundays, long days just trying to keep everybody happy.

“What I really need … is to have another small contractor like myself step up and buy a system so he can help me out.”

Jim Logan is the staff writer for Forester Communications

GEC - March/April 2005