Smaller contractors looking to remain competitive in today’s challenging business climate have few avenues for doing so. They can staff up — with the accompanying capital equipment purchases — to handle the additional workload; they can maintain the status quo, hoping their “tried and true” methods still hold up; or they can turn to technology designed to let users do more with their existing workforce.
Jason Graham, Owner of Graham Excavating, did the latter, opting to add an innovative solution that streamlined his workflow, improved the efficiency of his box blade-equipped compact track loader, and helped productivity soar.
Based out of Senecaville, Ohio, about an hour and a half east of Columbus, Graham Excavating works in a number of areas, including commercial site work, parking lot construction, utilities, roadway construction, building pads, and more. Established in 2016, the company — generally running a crew of five — works throughout southeastern Ohio and, according to Graham, has long been hampered by a workflow that was both slow and inefficient.
“For most of our jobs in the past, layout and grading was just a very slow process,” he said. “We really used the basic techniques — strings, tape measures, paint cans — as rudimentary as you can imagine. It was labor intensive, it wasn't always extremely accurate, and it was hard to get ‘the big picture’ of the job. Then, when stakes would inevitably get knocked over or we didn't have easy access to some information, we'd need to call back surveyors. At times, it was just a nightmare.”
To improve on that challenging situation, in 2022, Graham bought his first GPS system and quickly realized how beneficial it could be for improving accuracies and making the work a lot less labor intensive.
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“I had some real motivation for moving in that direction as well,” Graham said. “Not only did I want to compete with the bigger companies doing similar work in the area — which this would allow me to do — many of the contractors that we worked with on a regular basis were starting to demand that their subs had some sort of smart grade system. GPS would ensure that we were ahead of the curve in that regard.”
While Graham’s GPS base and rover changed things for him and his crews — layout was now dramatically easier, for example — it did not provide the scope of change he had hoped for.
“The accuracies were impressive — and more than enough for the commercial work we were doing — but we really wanted something that could take us to that next level in both layout and grade control,” Graham said. “A friend suggested I talk to Josh Isham at GeoShack, our local Topcon dealer, which I did, and it was an eye-opener. He initially offered to help us better understand the GPS solution we had but also listened to what our goals for a solution were. With that info in mind, he introduced me to the Topcon LN-150 Layout Navigator and all the possibilities it offered. For us, nothing was the same from that point on.”
The strengths of the robotic LN-150 that won Graham over so quickly centered around its ability to simplify the layout process and provide accuracies the likes of which they had never seen. However, it provided something which was becoming increasingly important to them as a growing company: accountability.
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“At the time, we were starting to get work in which we were the middle man,” Graham said. “For example, on a road project there’d be the site contractor, then us providing the stone, followed by the asphalt contractor. When issues arose, all fingers tended to point to us as the culprit. But the LN gave us the accountability we needed. Now we could go out and check the asphalt guys, check the subgrade, and definitively show where they were wrong, rather than me having to prove that I wasn’t wrong. This is too small of a town to have any kind of negativity attached to our name. The LN eliminated that risk for us.”
The benefits realized with the LN — particularly in expediting the layout process — whetted Graham’s appetite for even more productivity, and GeoShack’s Isham was only too happy to oblige. Knowing a John Deere 333G Compact Track Loader was a regular part of Graham’s operation, Isham showed him the potential of teaming up that machine with a Level Best box blade, then controlling it all with the Topcon MC-Mobile solution.
“Once Josh showed me what MC-Mobile could do for us, we were all in,” Graham said. “I have an excellent site foreman, Patrick Ross, who was not only quick to learn the LN, he applied that knowledge — and his skill — to MC-Mobile. As a result, the workflow of today looks nothing like it used to. He can get to a job site and use the LN to lay the site out, then put that same tablet in the machine and immediately get to work. In fact, only six months after purchasing our LN, we added a second one. It’s a whole new ballgame for us now.”
The current challenge of maintaining a steady, reliable crew has not escaped companies like Graham Excavating. While Graham is quick to praise the team he currently has, he is equally quick to cite the benefits the new technology provides in that area as well.
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“I no longer have to spend months training someone to grade a parking lot,” he said. “Instead, with MC-Mobile on that track loader, I can spend five to 10 minutes showing a guy how to run through the info on the screen and let the machine do the work. That's already proven a nice plus for us.”
Tackling between 75 and 100 projects a year, Graham Excavating does so with a very limited staff. Being able to do more with that same payroll has long been a goal — one that was realized with the addition of the Topcon solution.
“For most of our time in business, the work was so labor intensive that we operated with a single, large crew. That’s what it took to get things done,” Graham said. "However, since adding MC-Mobile, we can now split into two — or even three — smaller crews instead of just one. Using an LN, each crew can do layouts, grade checks, surface checks, etc. That’s easily doubled our efficiency and allowed us to be far more competitive.”
Pluses on the efficiency side of the equation also include a newfound ability to quickly and easily control material costs.
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“We can mobilize on a job site and have a man with an LN double check before putting any stone down or starting any type of grade work,” Graham said. “Doing so let’s us know the grades are where they need to be and that we're putting down the right amount of stone. With stone at $30 to $40 a ton, overages or shortages can get costly very quickly.”
Graham and his team have long been at the mercy of someone else’s schedule — surveyors being a great case in point. When laying out or grading a curved section of road using traditional methods, for example, the company would have to rely on an outsourced surveyor to install grade stakes at a given offset, a certain distance apart from one another, and with elevation marked on each stake. That scenario, Graham said, is a thing of the past.
“Not only was that time consuming, but we were dependent on a surveyor and their schedule,” he said. “With MC-Mobile and the LN-150, not only can we perform our own layout for that curved section of road, we can see exactly where the edge of our blade is on the tablet, in real time. Knowing that it’s following grade by itself, we can follow that curved line on the screen as opposed to trying to see it from the cab and make inaccurate assumptions. It’s better in so many ways.”
Graham said he could never envision having to revert to the old way of doing their work.
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“It really comes down to timing. We simply can't do a project in a timely manner using the old techniques,” he said. “In some cases, using the new solution, we have cut our time by 75 percent on a project. When a smaller contractor like us is building a road or a parking lot — complex three-dimensional designs that can’t be done with a laser, string, or pins — this is definitely the answer.”
It is not often that a subcontractor gets to show off its wares directly to the general contractor, but that opportunity recently presented itself to Graham. The results, he said, were impressive.
“A project manager happened to be coming through the job site when we were in the midst of grading an area with the box blade running MC-Mobile,” he said. “When that individual started asking about the technology we were using, we gave him some background on the solution, then set up our tripod and our prism to demonstrate its strengths. We checked four or five spots with him, and we were within the 1/8 on every single spot that we checked. He was impressed, not just with those accuracies but with the solution as a whole. It’s just one more way for us to separate ourselves from the pack.”
