Digital terrain mapping, machine control, file conversion, document management: The companies that make the software talk about the new era of data-driven project management.

By Penelope Grenoble

“People who embrace technology realize there’s more opportunity to reduce mistakes and make more money, and the ones who don’t will either become dinosaurs or be acquired by someone else.” —Jim Wenninger, WennSoft

“Using GPS just for site grading is like bringing a whiffle bat to a gunfight.” —Marco Cecala, Take-off Professionals

If you’d asked contractors five years ago what they thought aboua digital terrain mapping, 3D machine control, and computerized document management, any number of them might have told you these were too far down the road to be bothered with and would divert precious time and money from the real business of moving dirt around. But technology and the software that makes it sing have continued a relentless march across the landscape to the point that Bruce Carlson of Carlson Software Inc. refers to the heavy equipment at the heart of the industry as “printers and pens on the land.”

“I don’t think the word ‘conflict’ is too strong,” says Brad Mathews, vice president of sales and marketing at Dexter + Chaney, developers of construction management software, about what he considers the neglected interface between dirt moving and tracking the operations that make it happen. “When you’re running a job, your objective is achieving certain quantities of production, but you also have to record equipment and operator hours, which are critical to the information management side of the business.

“Contractors have expectations about site management based on experience, but undoubtedly there are going to be things that happen on a particular job that change those expectations. The question is how do you take these into account and deal with them. Getting the physical work done to specifications is critical, but your real objective is making money.”

“Businesses in this country have typically been set up so that decision-making filters from the top down,” says Steve McGough, chief executive officer of Heavy Construction Software Systems (HCSS). Foremen are told how to perform their jobs and seldom receive the kind of feedback they need on how they’re doing. We believe products that allow foremen, superintendents, and project managers to run what-if scenarios provide the right kind of feedback. What if I changed my crew makeup, what if I added another excavator? How would this affect my production?”

Without the new technologies, says WennSoft chief executive officer Jim Wenninger, contractors are going to be left behind in this brave new world that’s being created. He cites the example of a client with 6,000 truckloads of dirt to dispose of. A local golf course turned out to be the answer, but only because a GPS and a laser on the dozer blade made it possible to meet the required pitches and grades within the tolerances the golf course specified.

“We tell our customers they don’t know what they don’t know,” says Marco Cecala, president of Take-off Professionals. “When they purchase any type of machine control or positioning software, they’re usually after one thing—they want to put the blade on automatic and grade. Then people like us started offering value-added services. What about the utilities? You can take the technology you used to stake the elevation of a parking lot and make that the bottom of the trench for a storm drain. There’s no new code required. You’re just adapting existing technology.

“We tell contractors, ‘Now that you’ve got this in your hands, why not use it to run a topo every Friday afternoon and Monday morning so you know how much dirt you used the previous week, which allows you to instantly job-cost? And if the job starts to go sideways, you can rescue it before you start losing money. Take a topo and do a takeoff, and then submit it with your request so whoever is paying you a progress payment knows you really have done 30% of the earthmoving.’ That’s the thread of what we see happening.”

Everyone agrees that to be worth what you pay to get it, information has to be usable. “Project management hasn’t changed too drastically since the pyramids of Egypt,” says Richard Sappe, industry marketing manager for Primavera Systems Inc. “But we still don’t have really in-depth knowledge of how we can maximize value or even increase our ROI. It’s critical to have the ability to standardize best management practices and start capturing our intellectual knowledge and expertise in a way that information can be leveraged across an entire organization.”

“It’s about understanding profitability,” says Justin Heitmann, internet specialist at Bid2Win. “We’ve created an estimating and bidding tool so people can understand the costs that go into the bid and be able to project how much money they’re going to make or not if they bid a job a particular way. People win jobs all the time, but they don’t understand how. Is it because they undercut material and they’re really not going to make any money?”

“Project teams want access to data-collection and management systems,” says Roger Kirk, president and chief executive officer of Computer Guidance Corp. “The trend toward a fully integrated single database has just been realized in the last two years, a data base that integrates all your project management functions with your financial management functions so you’re blending information to get better cost projections and better financial results.”

Everyone also agrees that for technology to be worth the investment it requires the right people being in the right place at the right time. McGough considers the current shortage of qualified staff one of the biggest obstacles to growth in the industry. “At HCSS, we believe management that develops what we call ‘knowledgeable workers’ is ahead of the game. If you empower people, you’re not going to lose them to competitors.”

“The world is immediate,” says Wenninger. “We’re starting to hear from a lot of our clients that their employees are asking about systems that will help them do their jobs.” (Sappe calls this a desire for “cool tools.”) “But companies that introduce technology without adequate training also lose people, who then often end up in a new environment where technology is being used by people who are up to speed and where they can learn faster. The contractors who embrace technology hire the right people. People who see technology as a necessary evil look for the guy on the staff who’s the smartest with his cell phone and PC and maybe knows how to download music. Then they give him the job of figuring out how to make it work.”

“The beauty of technology,” says Mathews, “is that when you turn it on today, it’s identical to yesterday. It has some new numbers and information, but the tool is identical.” Technology, however, is only part of the equation. People and jobs vary. “Each project is unique, which means results are difficult to reproduce. But variation is the enemy of productivity and quality and cost control. To the extent that we can make site-management processes easier and can truly capture relevant information, we enable the project manager to focus on variation and work to reduce it.

“Let’s say once a week we want the foreman or project manager to do essentially a cost-to-complete projection, which for this phase of activity has got a plan for 100 units. You’ve done 12; now how many more are required? The math would say 88, but now that you’ve done 12, do you really think you have to do 88? And is it still going to take 60 hours to produce that 88? This kind of analysis is at the heart of effective site management, and our goal is to make it easier by creating software that utilizes a task orientation and features a list of the things they have to do to accomplish each task. Granted the guy still has to get the numbers right. But by making the process itself simpler, we allow him to focus on the hard part.”

“The high-end contractors are buying the equipment and doing it on their own, hiring their own staking [team], GPS staff, or engineer to do their design work,” say Mike Gillum, director of estimating research and development for Maxwell Systems. “The smaller guys are still relying on the engineers, or the new trend is to hire someone right out of college with a construction-technology or engineering degree. The problem with the smaller contractors is they don’t have the time. They’ll get a job and use the software, then not touch it for six months—which means they have to come back and reeducate themselves.” To help contractors get familiar with what software can do for them, Maxwell sets up workstations at trade shows where contractors can actually utilize their software and apply it to their jobs. The company also maintains training locations around the country.

“The problem in all of this,” says Mathews, “is that financial results are delayed. You’re doing things in the field every day that have financial implications, but they’re not necessarily obvious.” To make the connection, software manufacturers are developing staffs to demonstrate how their systems can make both office processes and in-field processes more efficient and cost-effective. “Our goal,” says Mathews, “is to make the information side easier and more routine by providing information back to people who are using it regularly, so when something unexpected happens they can do what needs to be done to get the job back on track and maintain their productivity and cost control.

“We select a problem that everybody can recognize and pilot it with a project manager who’s interested. One example is collecting time in the field—instead of the typical procedure of trying to compile that data at the end of the week. We set it up to collect the hours every day, along with production quantities. Maybe the crew thought they had a great day. Maybe they did. Maybe not. Maybe they’re using the wrong mix of equipment, or maybe they’ve got people who are at too high a pay rate and what they really need to do is shift their personnel around.

“One interesting thing we’ve found in this is there’s no end point. Every time we create something new, the feedback goes along the lines of, ‘We need this one more piece’ or ‘If we could extent it over there …’”

HCSS has also found that working with contractors pays off with more substantial ROI gains. Two years ago, the company opened up an implementation center at its headquarters in Houston. Specially trained personnel sit down with five or six members of a contractor’s staff from estimating, operations, or payroll and from the field to determine how the software can be integrated with their particular operations. “Once we get buy-in,” says McGough, “we go back onsite and train the foremen and other actual users based on the processes their own group and our own staff documented and developed.”

“With the tolerance for error becoming smaller, contractors are definitely feeling the pressure to adopt technology,” says Matt Gebarowski at DirtLogic LLC. “GPS and model building are speeding things up and have also helped contractors gain a lot more control over their projects. The advent of high-technology software has also helped create service-industry companies such as ours that offer an affordable outsource option for takeoffs and GPS models. Plus we provide GPS-model field training to contractors to help them make the most of their technology and equipment.

“Typically they’ll use their CAD file in the GPS system to mass-grade the project because the tolerance of a model directly from the engineer will be 6 to 8 inches throughout the site. When we tighten it up, they can dial the site within a tenth of a foot. They don’t trust the model enough because it’s not close enough, so when they would go to find, say, a manhole, a curb return, a catch basin, they’d have to guess approximately where it was according to some line work they had inside their system. They do this instead of actually dialing in the coordinates. It’s kind of like you’re used to using Mapquest then all of a sudden you get a new car that has a GPS system and you type in the address and it directs you to where you want to go. On an $800,000 project, a contractor can save $10,000 to $15,000 just on staking and production. And we’ve become the engineer’s friend. They’ll tell a contractor they don’t want to give them the data directly, but they’ll give it to us to sort it out.”

For former surveyor Brennan O’Neill of O’Neill Positioning Services, technology has changed a number of aspects of site management. Currently his company focuses on site positioning and GPS troubleshooting. “GPS is very expensive technology, and people expect they’re going to get the right answer all the time. But there can be problems—setting up the base station, calibrating, making sure everybody—the machine, the engineer, the surveyor—are on the same coordinate system.

“Contractors have had to adapt to using files created from their software [that have been] transformed into something that can be used by other programs and formats and transferred into the field. The question is, How much are the digital files worth? If the survey firm won’t have any staking responsibilities, how much do they sell this digital data for? If the contractors create the files internally, they still need the control from the survey and engineering firms to make the files fit.

“Historically it was the surveyor’s job to make it all work in the field. Early adopters had surveyors on staff or trained estimators to deal with these routine problems. Some have hired or paid surveyors or engineers to get the digital files in formats they can use. Most of the new users get their expertise from the companies they purchase the gear and the software from. Then they pick what I call a champion to get further training and help them improve their utilization of the new technology. That person may consult a third-party person to provide them with the files they need. Once they see, after multiple checks and redundancy, that they are saving time and money, they will start to trust the technology more.”

“The ideal would be for the people who are generating the plans to actually generate all the quantities and the materials,” says Gregg LaPore, president of Trakware Inc., providers of excavation software. “The people doing the design would actually be doing the estimates, and the contractor or subcontractor would then apply the dollar values. The next best ideal is for the people who do the Autocad drawings to really do them with an eye to making them accurate and easy for somebody to import. In the meantime, this new profession is being created, the 3D model maker. We tell people to get their models done by a professional. If they’re using the model for machine control, it’s a pittance compared to the money they’ll save.”

“I don’t believe the original software developers see the big picture,” says surveyor Cathy Walp, who creates models from CAD files and teaches contractors to use model-making software. “It took the appearance of GPS on the construction scene for them to bring their software up to date. The early adopters have become masters of the software and have at least one in-house expert whose sole job is to make 3D models or supply data for the field. I wish more surveyors would get involved in data prep and making models. They’re the experts. Technology is great at compressing time, but it hasn’t reduced the amount of work that’s required.”

Where is all this headed? In the area of model making, things appear to be going as LaPore suggests, with the development of new project support professionals who in some states now have to be licensed to ply their trade. Automating information processes in and for the field is where Dexter + Chaney is headed, says Mathews. McGough thinks we’ll be seeing “tighter integrations, cleaner interfaces, and quicker, faster, data flow to provide the operations people with access to the different parts of systems.”

“I think the biggest thing we’ll see,” says Dave Todaro, vice president at Bid2 Win, “is more connectivity—that is, increased availability and accessibility of information. We’re certainly seeing an increased awareness of technology and what it can do. It’s gone from ‘We’re doing a fine job here with our paper method or our spreadsheets’ to ‘Isn’t there some piece of software or some technology that can help us out? Isn’t there some way I can use this Trio to communicate information we need?’”

“High-speed Iternet access,” says Norman Wendl, president of Corecon Industries, which markets a suite of estimating and project-management software. “But education is a serious challenge.” Corecon offers live Web-based training and considers the Internet key in both education and software utilization. But, says Wendl, to facilitate maximum use of technology it’s critical to make field personnel comfortable with technology, from computers to satellite phones. Brent Hooton, sales manager for SharpeSoft Inc., agrees. “People are seeing the benefits of tracking numbers out in the field. Before they’d be content with knowing such and such a person was on the site. But the question is, What was that person working on?

“We forecast we’ll be doing different kinds of software—accounting software, for example, that will integrate with our programs so that information for the estimate will come over with the budget, and cost and workers comp codes will come over from the estimating program.”

“Best of breed is not the solution anymore,” says Kirk. “Contractors are willing to give up some of the features and functions of specialized programs for a fully integrated system where they’re not doing reconciliation between the project and financial information, which for a large company can be huge. As a result, the bar today to enter the software world is you’d better have project-management as well as financial-management and document-management systems.”

“The future we see coming,” says Sappe, “is interoperability, having a set of solutions that really ties the industry’s processes together, from concept through planning and design to execution and construction all the way through permitting, inspection, and handover. So you have a single point of data entry and that data is leveraged throughout the life cycle, and the systems can communicate effectively with one another.

“Contractors, even those who are recruiting the right kind of people, know they need to leverage technology better. As a consequence the CIO or IT director is becoming that much more business-critical. He’s no longer maintaining desktops so they don’t crash. He’s working with the CFO to define how to maximize their return and more efficient in getting their project work done.”

“In the past,” says Wendl, “having a central location for your project data across corporations or organizations or even offices was a real challenge. Today it’s key, and it certainly would make companies acquiring other companies, especially in a different geographical location, easier to manage and would create some synergies.” Maybe so, says Sappe, although he thinks software and technology integration unfortunately don’t rank sufficiently high in decision-making about acquisitions.

Bruce Carlson thinks we’re headed for 4D. “Construction-site software still focuses on quantities and surface-—quantities for estimation, surfaces to grade to—but this area of sequencing and scheduling equipment and deciding where to move dirt first, from where to where and with what equipment, has been a way of life for decades in mines, which even have diagnostic capabilities available on the health of their machines. The software hasn’t moved from the mines to the construction site, but it’s inevitable. At construction sites, contractors are thrilled to have machine control to grade quickly, but they still use traditional rules of thumb to select the equipment and decide where to start. They lack a plan and a dispatch system and wireless communication to communicate data to grade with and get the results of the grading back the other way in real time.

“Wireless is going to get more powerful. The problem right now is that what you want is super high data throughput, where you can send big files out to the equipment and have the XYZ and time-stamp positions come back to the office so you can do all kinds of monitoring and diagnosis. ... At Carlson, we’re trying to cover the whole spectrum, which means design, surveying, construction estimation, and surface creation to feed the heavy equipment for machine control. We’re trying to fill in the gaps. Which just goes to show you that software generally is in its infancy. It’s a 27-year-old industry, and it’s racing at top speed to do all of this.”  

Writer Penelope Grenoble specializes in environmental topics.

GEC - January 2008

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