And with today’s tools, it’s easier than ever. 

Knowledge is power, they say. That’s never truer than when contractors can document their performance and prove what they did or did not do. Proper documentation can ensure that you are fully compensated for all work performed. You can protect yourself against lawsuits. And you will have the knowledge required to change construction methods to make more money on a job.

And thanks to an array of increasingly sophisticated tools, documenting your performance is getting easier than ever. Computer software, for example, makes it possible to compare daily project production with your estimate. Voila! You can tell if you made money on a given day, week, or month. Aerial photography can document project progress and protect against lawsuits. Pavement profilers are better than ever, and asphalt stiffness meters are available on the actual rollers.

Are you losing money?

For example, project managers at Mario Sinacola & Sons Excavating, Frisco, Texas, use Heavy Job software from HCSS to check work progress against estimates. Each day, managers enter into a computer all labor, equipment, and production accomplished. Each phase of work, say, mainline paving, is given a cost code. So labor and equipment are assigned to the proper cost code for the day.

The Nevada DOT has set up automatic digital Webcams to take photos like these, left and right, of the Interstate 580 bridge over Galena Creek between Carson City and Reno.

                           

“You can track production versus your estimate to analyze your methods,” says James McKeehan, business system manager with Mario Sinacola. “Do you need more equipment or more labor? It lets you analyze your methods without running a report. You can go to a production analysis module, and if you get a number in red, you’re losing money.”

McKeehan cites a recent example where Sinacola employed two crews, a larger one for slipform concrete paving and another for hand pours of concrete. One day, the slipform crew was not working and, instead, helped out the hand-pour crew. The numbers for the slipform crew were right on budget. But when the slipform crew went to help the hand-pour crew, “their numbers were in the red,” says McKeehan. “They had twice as many guys as we budgeted, but they placed the same amount of concrete.

“We want our managers to make informed decisions and use the tools that they have available, such as Heavy Job software,” says McKeehan. The software has a forecasting module that enables a manager to predict how much production he needs to achieve, with a given level of equipment, to stay within budget. “Our foremen and superintendents are not waiting on anybody else to get that information,” says McKeehan. “Heavy Job is user friendly, and makes the information easy to find.”

Often, he says, the production analysis challenges managers to be more efficient with the equipment they have. “Just because you don’t have exactly the right equipment for a job is no excuse for losing money,” says McKeehan. “You can still be productive with what you have.”            

Cost control

McAninch Corporation, a large Des Moines, Iowa-based earthmoving contractor, uses its own software, called MacTrack, to streamline the payroll process and handle job-costing information. The software enables the company to do payroll with just one office person for 550 employees that belong to 34 different labor unions. 

Every day, each of the 80 McAninch foremen uses a laptop or handheld computer to report hours by worker, by machine, by project, and by phase of the work. (Here, work phase refers to cost code, such as clearing and grubbing, placing rip-rap, etc.) Many of the foremen use handheld computers with a data card that slides into a slot on the computer and enables it to communicate — via cellular phone technology — to the home office in Des Moines. Going wireless means a foreman can send in his information directly from a project — whether it’s in North Carolina or Nebraska — without going home to use a land line.

Foremen also use MacTrack to report equipment meter hours in the same way they report labor hours. “That information flows into our accounting data base, which generates preventive maintenance reports for each machine,” says Dave Stitz, McAninch controller. “We print out PM work orders once a week,” says Stitz. “It’s a high priority in our company because of the high value of our machinery.” The McAninch fleet has a replacement value of some $80 million.

McAninch is working on a production piece of the MacTrack software that will enable a user to obtain, say, the daily cost per yard of earth moved. McAninch’s project managers can, however, compare their daily cost information from MacTrack with the estimated numbers — in the office and on paper.

“That’s far and away the biggest benefit of MacTrack,” says Stitz. “If our project managers see that something is going off track, they can correct it in the first day or two that it occurs — not three or four days later. This software allows us to make changes in real time.” 

Stitz says the most challenging part of using MacTrack was to train foremen to use computers and the software. He did the training. “We had several small group meetings and did hands-on training in a training room,” says Stitz. “We just walked through the process step by step. I’d say 15% of our guys have laptops and the rest have handheld computers.”        

High-value photos

Documentation of your work can also take the form of photographs. “We couldn’t live without photographs,” says Ed DeMoss, CEO for Total Risk Management, a subsidiary of Clarkson Construction Company, a road builder in Kansas City, Missouri.

A high-speed profiler from Ames Engineering mounts on the rear of a van and can provide smoothness readings taken at highway speeds.

Clarkson uses aerial photos — taken on every project at three-week intervals — to document work-zone signage on highway projects, as well as to document construction progress. DeMoss uses a $12,000 high-resolution digital camera; each photo is 18 megabytes in size.

DeMoss says his company has avoided innumerable lawsuits because the company has photos that document proper signage in work zones or can prove that accidents were not Clarkson’s fault. In one case, a motorcyclist was following a truck through a work zone, lost control, and was killed.

“They figured the contractor had to do something wrong,” said DeMoss. “But the next morning after the accident, I took photos from the air and showed an oil slick where that motorcyclist lost control. The plaintiff decided they didn’t have a case because of the documentation that we had.

“That has happened several times,” says DeMoss. “We have saved the company millions of dollars with our aerial photography, and that’s being conservative. Or, our photographs have been helpful in getting restitution in cases that we were not brought into.”   

In many cases, plaintiffs may not try to sue Clarkson until two or three years after an accident has occurred. “Plaintiff’s attorneys like that because most contractors don’t keep records,” says DeMoss. “We keep our photographs. We download them into a program called Lynx, which proves the photos have not been modified. And we use a computer that can store a terabyte of information (1,000 gigabytes).”

If called before a jury, Clarkson displays its photographs on a large 4- by 8-foot screen. “I want the jury to see the picture, so that I can point out features within the photo. The jury can understand a photo better than they can a bunch of construction jargon.”

DeMoss says photos are also valuable management tools in working with subcontractors. If a subcontractor is running behind, the photos may show why. Or, a contractor might be able to recover additional payment because work is being delayed for a reimbursable reason, such as a utility that needs to be moved.  

Big Brother watching

Using a similar photographic documentation, a company called OxBlue Corporation, Atlanta, Georgia, will set up one or more weatherproof digital cameras (Web cams) on your bridge project or construction site. The cameras take still photos about every 10 to 15 minutes and transmit them, using cellular telephone technology, to the OxBlue data center in Atlanta.

OxBlue makes the progress photos accessible on the Web, often under a password protected site. Management officials can meet by conference call and review construction progress by looking at the same digital photos on the Web, says Chandler McCormack, OxBlue president.

One example of OxBlue’s system comes from the Interstate 580 bridge over Galena Creek being built on a new alignment between Carson City and Reno, Nevada. The state DOT has set up four Web cams on the project, which includes the world’s longest concrete arch bridge, at 698 feet (until a similar one is complete at Hoover Dam).

“The advantage of the photographs is that they help with construction claims and claims avoidance,” says Randy Bowling, a principal at Bowling Mamola Group, a consulting firm employed by the Nevada DOT. “Sometimes you can see that work is not happening and that’s the basis for a claim.”

Local citizens in the Nevada area had a voice in the type of bridge selected and are actively watching its progress on the Web, says Bowling. “The cameras and the Web site enable those people to be engaged in the project,” he says.

What’s more, the project’s original contractor experienced the collapse of a tall rebar cage being erected for a bridge column. So the contractor asked for time-lapse photography of the collapse, said Bowling Mamola partner Patty Mamola. That was no problem — by putting the images into a PowerPoint display, the time-lapse photography sped up the view of the collapse.  

Documenting pavements

Because most states use incentive/penalty systems to pay for pavement smoothness, a paving contractor needs a good profiler. Ames Engineering, of Ames, Iowa, makes two computerized profilers — the Model 8200 and the Model 6200. The 8200, a high-speed profiler, mounts to the bumper of a van and measures a pavement profile at highway speeds. The 6200 is a lightweight unit commonly mounted on a John Deere Gator utility tractor. A thermal strip printer is provided with the profilers.

McAninch uses its own software, called MacTrack, to report hours by worker, by machine, by project, and by phase of the work. Field personnel can report by cellular phone technology to the home office.
 

Diamond Surface, a Maple Grove, Minnesota contractor, uses an Ames Model 6200 profiler. “Generally, we document all the information we get because we have to show the states that our work is within the specs that they call for,” says Marlene Dunn, project manager for Diamond Surface, which does diamond grinding, dowel bar retrofits, concrete patchwork, and grooving of both concrete and asphalt.

She says the company has used both Ames’ triad laser and a single-point laser. The triad unit has three lasers and scans a larger area of the pavement, so that the concrete’s grinding grooves don’t show up as roughness on the pavement, Dunn says.

Ames’ profilers can print out an actual line trace of the pavement profile. Recently, Diamond Surface printed traces for a four-lane pavement measuring 6-miles long. That’s eight traces. “It was a mass mountain of paper,” says Dunn.

Getting density

At a recent asphalt resurfacing project on the Richmond, Indiana airport, Milestone Contractors used a BOMAG 190-AD-4-AM compactor with an intelligent compaction system to roll the asphalt for specified density. The machine is said to have intelligent compaction because, as the pavement approaches maximum density, the drum vibrations will flatten out to horizontal and stop hammering vertically on the pavement.

Ames Engineering mounts a lightweight profiler on a John Deere Gator to provide smoothness readings. 

BOMAG’s national accounts manager, Chuck Deahl, was involved in the Richmond project as an observer. The roller can read out asphalt stiffness numbers as the pavement is being compacted. “On the test strip, we decided to make three passes,” says Deahl. “We were getting around 96% of maximum density with three passes.”

But on the actual airfield pavement, the roller displayed numbers showing that it achieved sufficient density after two passes. “The intelligent compaction system showed us that two passes gave us pretty close to 300 psi, which correlates to 96%,” said Deahl. “The reason is that we were running on milled asphalt — a firmer base than the test strip.” He said it was not necessary to print out density numbers from the roller. 

The lesson in this story seems clear. In matters ranging from earthmoving to paving to bridge building, document your performance and you can get paid for it. Or, you reduce the likelihood that you’ll be wrongfully sued. Or, if you must defend your company in a lawsuit, you’ll have valid evidence. In all cases, documentation pays dividends — often in the millions of dollars.

Clarkson Construction says aerial photos have helped the company to avoid innumerable lawsuits and save millions of dollars. Clarkson projects are below, top to bottom: downtown Kansas City loop asphalt resurfacing and bridge repair; rebuilding and adding lanes to I-435 and Highway 69 in Kansas; reconstruction of an I-35 intersection in Lenexa, Kansas.