User Tools

Site Tools


underground:prelim_underground

Collection of early ideas, reference material, thoughts, and customer contacts for Underground program

Notes

Dwire

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.

Next Company

Design Thoughts

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

  • This could be the first Web based takeoff/modeling program
  • Key components are Importing PDF, CAD, LandXML (surfaces and pipe networks) and exporting CAD and LandXML
  • Support of the ESW is not necessary and is unlikely on non-windows servers.
  • This could follow the mass market app which needs PDF and add some of the other import/export formats
  • This version has to do its own volumes and be standalone. There's a slight risk some cheap soul uses it to calculate sitework volumes but I believe it's worth the risk on these outliers. During design there needs to be a conscious design segmenting of features to make this less appealing but not penalize underground users.
  • Trench modeling should be a workflow for excavating systems. FYI, the Topcon export is a dll and windows only. If LandXML works as that export then so much the better or we could have an on-demand windows server in AWS/Azure to just do this aspect.
  • We only sell this via subscription. There are overlapping customer bases but a lot of these folks don't know AGTEK and have no preconception on our pricing.

Customer Resources

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

23-storm_drainage_.xlsx

underground/prelim_underground.txt · Last modified: 2018/10/26 18:22 by mikeclapp