Collection of early ideas, reference material, thoughts, and customer contacts for Underground program
Contact with one of Caroline's customers at Dwire. Sent Trimble Report which he likes but quite a bit is the same as ours. Depth brackets biggest like. Two things that are interesting to me are the select backfill and other special quantities broken out. I don't understand why they break it out as square feet too unless there's some compaction costing that relates to area. It also includes a cost element but that isn't as important to him because there's really set costs associated with a fitting that a count represents fine. Important things on structures we know about like the height of each manhole structure due to number of joints/cost and cuts based on height.
I thought it interesting that they also reported by Station/Offset which I could see being useful for staging materials. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to do for any line and would be useful both for breakdown and for a mobile application.
Reported that Trimble data entry was difficult and as I look at the report I notice lots of details like outfall/etc that probably require a lot of data entry but are of more marginal value. They might be trying to model too much which is a drag on the estimating portion.
We combined Materials and Underground in the past and the new Materials is attempting to merge the sitework and Materials to a tighter link to minimize data entry. IMO this is correct. Underground doesn't have that need for the most part except that the current implementation has no ability to calculate volumes except in Earthwork. This is probably wrong and done for expediency. I believe we could make a standalone Underground because the data sharing between the two is really limited to the surfaces. In many cases the plan sheets used are even different than the grading. More often than not the design surface for underground may be the mass grading horizon with a final for structures being the finished surface rather than subgrade.
A couple thoughts
Dwire Earthmoving, Colorado Springs,
Steve Aslagson GPS program manager Dwire Earthmoving 6799 Bismark Road Suite C Colorado Springs, Colorado 80922 563-608-7381 Cell 719-375-3408 Fax http://www.dwirex.com stevermg@hotmail.com
Underground estimator. Loves our ease of entry, Trimble difficult entry but likes report.Depth brackets, rock, backfill quantities. Included