From Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Miami’s urban core, to practically everywhere else, a post-Covid construction boom continues to gather steam.
Even as material costs for lumber are up some 260 percent from last year (as of June 2021) and logistical logjams challenge numerous supply chains, a glut of federal stimulus money combined with burgeoning pandemic savings has jolted the engineering and construction industry into an exhilarating game of project catch-up and new project acquisition.
It’s a dose of summer exuberance that many in the industry are taking in stride. After all, the last 16 months of lockdown, social distancing, facemask wearing and the like have been grueling. But now, as the economy heats up (US GDP grew at a 6.4 percent rate in Q1 2021) along with the temps, maximizing – and adapting to – the post-Covid world is more important than ever.
For companies like Pittsburgh-based Limbach Holdings Inc., (with 10 branch offices throughout the US) that means a dedicated push toward upping their efficiency gains while reducing their per-project spend – all without loss of accuracy or quality control. Recently the publicly traded company (NASDAQ: LMB) which specializes in integrated building systems with expertise in the design, installation, management, service, and maintenance of HVAC, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and control systems, sought to improve its MEP workflows by incorporating 3D laser scanning/reality capture solutions into its business model.
To affect that change, earlier this year, Limbach purchased two FARO® Focuss 350 Laser Scanners from FARO Technologies Inc. along with its SCENE Software, As-Built™ Software, and Webshare Cloud, a suite of three programs ideal for site documentation for building structures as well as plant and MEP systems which include piping or HVAC. Combined, the hardware and software solutions have helped the $568 million revenue company streamline costs, enhance the efficiency of their workflows, accelerate project completion, and perhaps most important, navigate the ongoing health and safety restrictions related to Covid-19, and at the same time, attract new business in novel ways.
“The scanners are really allowing us to send one guy in to a project and capture in a few hours what a team of people used to do over the course of a week – field measuring, documenting, etc.,” said Mark Lamberson CPD, Limbach’s National VDC Manager. “So the scanner is grabbing every detail and I can share that file with all 10 branches of the company so that we can leverage the best people for the job.”
Profiting from the New Normal
Increasingly that means selecting talented team members from all over the country, Lamberson explained. In a post-Covid economy in which companies seek to minimize the number of staff on site for a project and also reduce their liability in case an employee falls ill or is injured on the job, the best-suited engineer might be in Ohio for one project and Florida in another. It’s that type of staffing deployment precision that 3D laser scanning and reality capture technology helps enable.
“Covid has required organizations, especially those like construction that are so labor intensive, to re-think certain processes of their business,” added Kipp Ivey, a FARO Applications Business Development Manager who has been a technical advisor to Limbach for the last 10 years. “You think about it, certain states have restrictions to prevent access to particular facilities. Even certain companies now have the authority or right to determine how many people are allowed in a structure or building at any given point. Covid has now made companies think ‘how do we mitigate human interaction and minimize the number of people that have to go on site.’”
In addition to its Covid-specific benefits, reality capture technology maintains its significant advantage over traditional measurement devices in terms of its speed and accuracy. Limbach knows this first hand as it completed a 3D laser scanning project earlier this year for a meatpacking business in downtown Detroit.
By taking the initial steps in embracing a service side reality capture component, the company documented the site and provided Revit® models to ensure that a new piece of bulky equipment would fit in the physical space. This type of documentation is especially important in older buildings in aging cities like Detroit where century-old physical structures lack their original blueprints, or even in newer buildings where upgrades and additions no longer match what was first constructed.
Thanks to the highly granular detail FARO’s Focus scanners capture (collecting millions of data points for point cloud generation in only a few minutes per scan) not only can Limbach document the facility in question, they can provide a variety of additional customer services, including:
- Logistics planning for newly selected equipment
- Supplemental engineering documents on how best to connect the equipment to building services
- The ability to return to the site to take subsequent scans in order to implement a digital twin process whereby a static single-scan of an as-built environment transforms into a “living document,” updated to match any changes made to the physical asset
- Site validation for off-site prefab to mitigate risk when fabricating assemblies for older facilities and enhancing the effects of industrialized construction
Automation Appeal
While it’s easy for naysayers to conclude that some of the post-Covid technology-enabled health and safety improvements will wane in importance as the months progress, Mark Lamberson is more optimistic. The post-Covid economy is not a flash in the pan moment. Rather, the new efficiencies and targeted deployment of personnel will persist. Time savings and money savings are not pandemic specific. And as the world has noted, Covid-safe protocols have also radically reduced the incidence of other illnesses and absences, too.
For these reasons, the new normal is here to stay. So if one employee on site can do what three could do previously, it stands to reason that automation’s potential only stands to increase. This is where the future lies – autonomous and semi-autonomous reality capture where a drone, operated remotely hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away, can perform the same tasks a single human can on site today.
It’s a future Mark Lamberson and Limbach Holdings Inc. are eager to embrace.