How Granite Construction Reduces Rework with Better Field Collaboration and Communication

On the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Highway 99 Realignment project, Granite Construction deployed Plangrid within Autodesk Construction Cloud™ to save labor hours and rework costs. Their work is leading a shift in the industry toward better field collaboration and communication enabled by cloud-based construction management.

5 hrs

saved per person, per week

$500k

savings in rework costs

Faster Communication Is Easy with Cloud-based Construction Management

Granite Construction is a heavy civil general contractor with a deep history of building American transportation systems. Tasked with building the $150 million Highway 99 Realignment project in Fresno, CA, they needed an effective way to coordinate significant complexity. The project involved moving several miles of highway from adjacent Union Pacific railroad tracks, relocating multiple local streets and utilities, and removing and replacing three bridges.

Caltrans also required that Granite provide mobile devices for the field. Granite chose PlanGrid to help improve communication and collaboration on the project.

Better Field Collaboration Means Less Rework

On Highway 99, a project with several thousand drawings and separate teams for day and night shifts, coordination and keeping up with changes was critical.

PlanGrid helped prevent significant errors that could have derailed the entire project by successfully and instantly sharing plan revisions with the field. The application notified the project team when and where their plans had changed and allowed users to easily overlay and compare different sheet versions.

“PlanGrid helped me catch what would have been a $30,000 to $40,000 mistake. I saw an area of the roadway that wasn’t graded properly, and when the foreman, who wasn’t using Plangrid, pulled out his paper plans, I quickly opened PlanGrid to show him that there was a revision. They were able to fix it before it became an issue.”

– Randy Lucchesi, Lead Project Engineer

PlanGrid Improves Field Productivity

While Granite’s project managers and project engineers used PlanGrid to keep drawings and construction documents organized, the field quickly adopted it for its mobility and ease of use to access the latest versions without unnecessary back and forth.

Granite has seen considerable gains in-field productivity by using PlanGrid on dozens of other projects, including the Folsom Dam Spillway in Folsom, CA. The company saved as much as $500,000 in rework costs an average of five hours per person per week. Granite continues to explore rolling out PlanGrid across projects in other regions across the country.

“It’s simple for people in the field to use, and plans download to your device, so you’re not reliant on internet connectivity. Whether you’re working in a metropolitan area (like we are) or out in the middle of nowhere, it works.”