Fulfilling 400 Dreams - GPS Speeds Job Completion

California has shaped and reshaped its identity, holding steadfast to a constant theme: glorious opportunity. From the Gold Rush of 1849 through the farming boom later in that century to the Transcontinental Railroad connection to the abundance of citrus, oil and ship-building industries to the growth of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, California has been the epicenter of a wildly diverse society and economy.

Post-World War II California has experienced a near continuous boom in residential housing with construction companies such as Sukut Construction contributing to the expansion. To date, the Santa Ana-based construction company has mass excavated and graded over one billion cubic yards of earth throughout California using scrapers, dozers, excavators, compactors and off-highway trucks.

In Murrieta, about 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles, Sukut is performing site prep and final grading fora new 400-home residential development, involving approximately 3 million cubic yards of soil. The 2,000-square-foot homes will be placed on 7,000-square-foot lot sand will sell for around $350,000 each.“

This job is a typical grading job, even though this site is very flat for Southern California,” said Matt Eklund, GPS program manager with Sukut. “Because of the terrain,much of our work in this region involves terracing hills and to the extreme, removing 100-foot landslides.”

The 166-acre site is a beehive of activity, all under the watch of site foreman, Ross Steer. A Caterpillar824 compactor follows the scrapers in the fill areas, compacting fill as it is placed; while off in a corner of the development a GPS-controlled Cat D6 dozer is making a first pass at finish grading while cutting in access roads for the tract housing. One thing that's notable is that these two pieces of equipment, as well as the other pieces of equipment on the site, are all equipped with Trimble® SiteVision® GPS systems.“

The Trimble system is awesome – you tell the operator and the machine what to do and they’re off and running,” Steer said. With the SiteVision GPS system that Sukut uses, the site plan is loaded directly onto the machine’s computer-based receiver with the control screen located in the operator compartment.“The technology empowers the machine operator since he’s got immediate feedback as to how he's progressing with the job,” Steer said. “The machine operators now have a set of tools they didn’t have before,” Eklund added.

The Cat 824 compactor is equipped with the latest version of the SiteVision GPS system, version 5.“All the operator needs to do is paint the screen green,” Eklund said, referring to the display screen that provides the operator with visual feedback as the machine progresses through the site plan. If the operator is on grade, the screen fills with the color green as each pass is made. The screen shows red if there’s overfill and blue when it’s shy of dirt.“

For this project, if the compactor operator is within3/10 and 7/10 of a foot on the pad, the screen will paint green,” Steer said. “It’s set up high so that when we punch the pads we’ll have complete compaction.”

According to Eklund, the crew on this project is a month and a half into this estimated three-month project and they’re well over half done.“

Advantages of the Trimble systems include an increasein production and the fact they allow for only one gradechecker to manage three or four pieces of equipment – so there’s a reduction in labor,” Eklund stated. “It doesn’t eliminate all stakes, but it does make the surveyors’ andour jobs much easier. We can get particular controlpoints such as 20- and 80-foot lot-line points and we can build some redundancies into the project to ensure we’redelivering the results as promised.”

Sukut Construction has been using the SiteVision GPS system for about two and a half years. “We’re getting more aggressive in how we use it,” Eklund stated. Sukut currently has seven pieces of equipment with Trimble systems, and plans to add more.“

The system allows for total control of the site,meaning that we don’t have to spend any set-up time– so if we get shut down in one area, we can send a dozer over to a location we haven’t been in and the operator knows exactly what needs to be done,”Eklund said.

Citing perhaps its greatest benefit Eklund stated,“The Trimble equipment has allowed us to bid on projects we previously couldn’t consider – in fact,we’ve been asked specifically by developers if we use GPS technology. We have one new bid where the developer had previously worked with a contractor using GPS and noted how much it saved them in money and time; and another customer gave us a new piece of business because we had used GPS on their last job and finished it a month early. We were awarded the work with the requirement that we use GPS on the new job.”

As Steer said with respect to Trimble GPS grade control, “It's definitely the way of the future– you can’t deny it – it’s the way we’ve got to go. We only need to dial it in to each application to make it efficient.”