has announced that DPR Construction has signed an enterprise-wide agreement with Skycatch, creating a new model of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) standardization and productivity available for all of their project sites.
In construction, the products and applications for using UAV’s have come a long way: From experimenting with fragmented consumer solutions to now depending on this data from a single commercial-grade kit. This enables customers to manage day to day operations, auditing and measuring performance – down to the centimeter. Providing this visibility and transparency into a project for both the project teams and owners has been a game changer for the industry.
DPR Construction using the High Precision Package
A frequent early adopter of technology, DPR realized the potential of precision aerial data when they started experimenting with UAV solutions in 2013. After years of individual sites across the U.S. recognizing the ROI and job site efficiency benefits, DPR decided it was important to offer a standardized solution enterprise-wide, creating a more streamlined implementation, centralized costs, and support. Most importantly, this gives more DPR projects the opportunity to take full advantage of this technology to increase the efficiency of project delivery.
Hannu Lindberg, a construction industry veteran and leader of DPR’s Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) team, says several factors came into the decision to fully standardize with Skycatch, but one key aspect stood out:
“Track record. We’ve seen Skycatch deliver results in a variety of applications and settings. We believe Skycatch offers the best opportunity for us to deliver our projects more efficiently at scale.”
Given the demand for this technology, DPR instituted the UAS CORE Group leadership team and began to conduct a formal evaluation process. Setting a high bar, the team performed a competitive analysis on virtually every solution on the market. The evaluation was based on defined criteria and weighed by their importance – but was also balanced with feedback from DPR project teams and their customers. DPR chose Skycatch, citing the enterprise partnership focus, quality of data, and robust software package.
“We realized that there’s a lot of fluidity in this space. Things are changing very rapidly, but the one thing that Skycatch demonstrated time in and time out: they are here with us. With monthly calls, dedicated support – even before we were enterprise customers. Skycatch has demonstrated again and again that they are our partner,” says DPR’s Tim Conroy, who served as the organization’s UAS CORE Group Lead.
“What we love about what we do is that we truly believe in not just the solution, but the relationship that we have with our partners and customers. From the beginning, we believe that creating trust and truly understanding the pain that our customers are experiencing, set the model for how we built our product and deal with any and all customers from DPR and beyond,” said Christian Sanz, Skycatch Founder & CEO.
The ability to share the data with a wide range of users from the design team to the subcontractor allowed DPR to enhance communication and efficiency immediately. Product-wise, project teams said they appreciated the clean and modern UI and the simplicity of the web platform for processing, viewing and analyzing data. From a management point of view, it was the enterprise-level project collaboration, and the high touch support and partnership. Skycatch’s responsiveness to DPR needs and requests were listed from various project teams as important factors that set Skycatch apart.
The ability to use Skycatch without needing to take the time to maintain GCPs on the ground nor tag them in the upload process, allows DPR to process gathered data in a fraction of the time. The insights gained by leveraging the Skycatch platform allows the DPR project teams “to take this knowledge and turn it into wisdom that can be shared across our projects,” says Conroy. Having an accurate representation of the project alone is immeasurable.
Other areas DPR has experienced benefits leveraging the Skycatch Solution are in logistics planning, BIM coordination, quality control, as-built verification, and billing verifications. DPR’s VDC leads believe that the technology will help scale their efforts and deliver the best in class data from their projects.
Source: Press Release