LocusView’s Digital Construction Management Brings As-Built Information In From the Field

Danny Petrecca, VP of Business Development at Locusview conducted an interview with Sanjay Gangal, president of GISCafe, recently to discuss the topic of digital construction management that Locusview pioneered to address the challenges of telecoms and utilities worldwide. Primarily, the solution aims to get as-built construction information in from the field back to the systems of record on time.

Sanjay: Tell us about Locusview.

Danny: So, Locusview is a company that was founded in 2014, and our focus is really around an area we’ve pioneered called digital construction management. It’s really a very pervasive problem at utilities and telecoms throughout the world, but it’s a very difficult problem to solve. It’s about how do you digitize construction crew workers in order to get as-built in construction information from the field back to the systems of record in a timely fashion, considering all the construction activities that are going on throughout the world in these markets.

Sanjay: Tell me little bit more about the problem you’re trying to solve first. I believe there are a lot of different companies in the market, but I want to understand your take on it.

Danny: That’s a great point. A lot of people ask that same question, and the problem is, is what you see here is, typically at utilities, the design and engineering, the construction execution and the closeout process. Utilities feel it’s fairly digitized, but what do you have is utility spending a lot of money on digital engineering to graphic work design solutions on the left side of this equation, digital GIS. Obviously at GISCafe, you know all the millions of millions of dollars utilities and telecom spend on their system of record being in GIS. Electric utility specifically spend 10 times more than that on the operational side of digital utilities, meaning ADMS and DER, and then there’s the other enterprise systems. Lots of digitization, so utilities feel that they’re fairly digital, but when a design is sent out to the field, it’s still sent out in paper. So, a crew has a paper, a piece of paper map, they go out in the field, it has the instructions of what they have to build, where to put their poles, where to run the fiber, where to dig the trench for the gas pipes, and then it’s a very inefficient process. Papers are in folders, they get lost, they get marked up, they get stained. The foreman of the construction crew is typically tasked with recording what is typically known as an “as-built.”

And what we find happens is the designs that are sent in the field are never constructed as designed, there are always changes to the designs in the field for a good reason, but they’re not well-documented. So, the ‘as-built; foremen in the field, end up doing what we call hitting the easy button. They basically say, “Yeah, we built it pretty much how you designed it, Mr. And Mrs. Engineer. So we’ll just check the box that we built it as designed and we’ll send it off to GIS.” So a couple of problems happen there, one is you’re not ending up with a true system of record represented into the GIS. You’re actually getting a representation of your designs in the GIS. And that causes lots of problems from risk, from safety, from asset management, and the traditional financial and asset-based drivers from utilities, but it goes much further than that. When the GIS team now, one month, two months, three months later, receives that ‘as-built’ paper packet from the contractor crew or the construction crew, and these are true numbers, we’ve spoken to utilities, that 30 to 60 to 90 days is a typical time it takes to get as-built paper packets back from the field.

GIS then has to manually re-digitize this information into their GIS. What they’re digitizing is really the design, it’s not a true representation of what was built in the field. So, the time it takes records to be updated in the system of record is just too long. And traditionally, utilities may have said, “Well, you know what, the way we do it today is just fine. You know what, we have electrons and gas and lasers running through our infrastructure, our customers are happy, why do we need to speed that up?” Well, there are a few main drivers here that are kicking that up. First of all, the overall increase in construction globally in critical infrastructure is increasing drastically.

On the electric side, the big drivers are what used to be called Smart Grid, which isn’t a term I really like, but distributed energy management where, distributed energy resources, where you need an ADMS or a digital brain to run the real-time grid model. That requires much more data than the financial, the GIS teams have dealt with in the past. On top of that, you have grid modernization, you have grid hardening, wildfire prevention, all driving more construction in electric. On the telecom side, very soon or if it hasn’t passed yet, there’s a huge growth in broadband demand and a lot of federal stimulus going into rural broadband hook ups here in the U.S., and it’s been a trend going on globally, so much more construction is going on in the telecom industry, and again, that’s a very competitive industry.

So once they put fiber in the ground and it’s lit, they want to know the day that they can sell it to their subscribers to realize the revenue on their investment. And then on the gas distribution side it’s really about safety, risk and then compliance with, here in the US, the PHMSA Mega Rule around tracking and traceability, about where have you placed your plastic assets, where are they located, to very high accuracy GPS. Who welded the pipes together? Who fused that T? All the tracking and tracing, this all is making this legacy paper-driven workflow. Its days are numbered, really. Utilities can continue to do this with all of the drivers going out there, begging them to complete a digital workflow from design to construction execution, all the way to a system of record.

Sanjay: What is Locusview Solution?

Danny:  What we do is take that middle piece, which is typically a paper packet, and we digitize the construction crews. And the way we do that is by bringing in the information from the work-generating systems. It’s typically work management or graphic work design. Instead of a paper packet, we are bringing into our solution a digital job packet which includes the build materials of the compatible units, the design sketch. And this application can be a single repository for all the documents that that crew needs out in the field to perform their work, including permits, applications, right of way, you name it. They then use this application, so the main aspect is a mobile application. Android, Windows, iOS. Tablets and smartphones are the typical form factor.

For Windows, some people like to use laptops in the field as well. They then use this mobile application, which I know many people are going to say, “It’s just another mobile GIS application,” but I’ll come back to that. They use that to collect their as-built information, to collect the high accuracy GPS location of all their assets, to collect automated material reconciliation information, and any other forms-based information that goes along with the job such as operator qualifications, Tailgate Safety checks, PPE checks, and then going even further and making sure that the construction crew only collects the data they need, when they need it within the workflow. So while that’s happening in the field, the web component of Locusview allows the supervisors and construction managers to visualize and see the progress of construction in real time. This is a great thing for operational planning, for crew management and for revenue realization. But it also ensures that the crews in the field collect all the data that’s needed before they demobilize, before they throw that last shovel of dirt on the trench, when it is almost impossible to go back and collect the accurate data.

From there we update directly through integration, the GIS and the work and asset management systems, improving that close out time. Close out that used to take 30, 60, 90 days, we’re taking from days and weeks and months down to hours, where an automatic GIS update with the GIS team getting their data on automatic work and asset management close out with material reconciliation, all done automatically. And it’s not just the software piece, which is obviously native applications on iOS and Android and Windows in a Cloud-based web application. But we have a full solution that includes all the hardware that’s needed to do this from recognized tablets, recognized barcode scanners for the gas tracking and traceability, which is the ACM standard. The high accuracy GPS units, all come pre-packaged and pre-integrated into our solutions, so there’s no need for utilities to have to spin up resources to know how to fix an RTK base station or how to do Bluetooth connectivity between Android and a GPS receiver. It’s really that full solution that sits in the middle. We like to say we bridge that gap between design engineering and close out. We remove paper from this entire workflow.

Sanjay: And is there a solution? A product-based solution. Are you selling product or are you selling products and services together?

Danny: We are a software company. It is a full product solution that you purchase from us, just like any other software vendor, we provide implementation services around our products, training, technical support, all that, that goes along with the typical software application. But back to the point I made before, that I said I’d come back to, a lot of people out there say, “Well, I can just do this with paper and be fine,” or “I do this with my asset management mobile app or our mobile GIS app.” What we found is that… Or a mobile design application to do the as-built thing. What we find is that… What we have mastered, because of the DNA of where our company came from, we’ve really mastered matching the UI and UX of our application to the workflow out in the field and to the construction crew persona.

We came out of the Gas Technology Institute, where we were tasked with building next generation digital construction solutions for the energy industry, and we built this application, with GTI and with the industry and utilities using an R&D mindset. We weren’t a solution looking for a problem. We built the solution for a problem with the people who use it in the field. I know it’s strange to hear someone say the UI and UX of our application is so clean and effective and simple, that it is a differentiator, but that’s really what we see. I’ve spent 20 years trying to sell digital applications to construction workers in the field and to utility mobile crews. They always reject it because it’s just too complicated and it doesn’t fit their persona. We solve that by the UI, UX, we have in our workflow-based mobile first mentality that drives us as a company.

Sanjay: Okay. And Locusview, as you said, was founded in 2014. How many people do you have now?

Danny: We’re about 140 and growing, and I say about, because we are growing rapidly. When I joined two years ago, we were about 80 or 90 people. We have offices in North America, mainly based out of Chicago, that’s where our product, professional services and management team is. And then in Tel Aviv, is the other half of Locusview, which is mainly our R&D Development Product Management and other corporate support there as well.

Sanjay: And do you sell primarily in USA, in North America or do you sell worldwide?

Danny: We sell worldwide. We are strategically growing in areas like Asia Pacific, ANZ, Europe, Latin America, but our stronghold right now and our main market share here is in the U.S. We have half of the 20 largest utilities in the U.S. using our application here, and over 5,000 crews every day using our application. The other interesting fact about that 5000 crew number is that it’s not just utility crews. More than half of them are contract recruits. That’s another problem that a lot of other applications have a hard time solving, is how do you provision a license to a contractor, how do you make it secure and how do you make it easy enough to use? And again, we’ve solved that, we have 2500 or more contract crews using this on a daily basis.

Sanjay: And what is the best way for our audience to find out more about Locusview on the internet?

Danny: Well, obviously the website, Locusview.com, The typical social media, so we’re on LinkedIn, you can follow me on LinkedIn at DPetrecca and on Twitter, they are both Locusview and my own personas within Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re an Esri partner, so we always support the Esri industry events. We just did the Esri User Conference back in July. It was virtual. We will be attending the Esri IMGIS Conference coming up in October, which thankfully, it looks like that one has gone live, so it’s going be an in-person event in Palm Springs. We’re excited to go back and re-connect with all our Esri colleagues and all the partners and customers that go to that excellent event. We’ll also be at the AGA Conference in Florida and next year, DISTRIBUTECH, focusing on the electric utility space. And then we also have a telecom conference, and we’ll be at the ISE EXPO in Fort Worth at the end of this month. So, very active, very good to see events starting to go live again, so we’re out there making a market for Locusview.

Tags: ArcGIS, data, ESRI, geospatial, GIS, imagery, Infrastructure, mapping, mobile mapping

Categories: analytics, asset management, Big Data, Building Information Modeling, cloud, data, Esri, geospatial, GIS, government, location based services, mapping, subsurface utilities, survey, telecommunications, transportation, utilities, utility geographic information systems, Video Interview

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