Kelly & Shepherd's supervisor Norm Gibson is the person bearing initial responsibility for ensuring that our earthmoving activities are to the client's specifications. He finds our use of GPS-based surveying makes his job easier, more efficient, faster and results in a safer site. Norm's comments follow:
"The system is a lot safer. We have fewer men on the ground, and it's much quicker, because you don't have to do a traverse first. You just put the rover on the vehicle's roof and away you go.
It's also excellent for quality control. When we're planning a fill, we can drive over the site and do a digital terrain model (DTM), and it takes just a few minutes. Then once the fill's completed, we drive the site again, and it tells us exactly what depth of layers the equipment has put down.
It tells us exactly the layer thicknesses which have gone in, plus the total volumes placed and cut.
It also works well when we're planning a difficult or complex site. We just hook up the 3D GPS screen to the Odyssey antenna and drive the site, so the actual machine control display is in the car.
I'll go out and drive the site with the foreman for the job, and we can see exactly the cut and fill required for each section. That helps the foreman visualise the project so he knows what's involved.
We did the same thing recently for the local council. We took the engineers along the route of a new road that was proposed, and they could see what the site would look like after it was completed, and the work involved.
We'll also drive the entire site once a week, then import the measurements into CivilCad; within a couple of hours, we know the exact quantities we've moved during the week. We can compare those with load control records the foreman has been keeping, so we know exactly how efficient our operation is."