Go.
Hello. Hi, everyone. We’re gonna give another minute just while people are filing in.
My name is Chelsea. This is Ted. He will be doing a bulk of the information while we’re here. We’ll give it a couple minutes while people file it.
Yeah. Chelsea’s doing me a solid.
I’m gonna be talking at you for forty five minutes, so I might as well I’ll be in the chat.
I’ll be separately talking at you two.
And for everybody in there, just to make sure that the chat’s working, go ahead and throw in your best dad joke. If possible.
Got a couple hellos. Hello, everyone. Chat. Ted, let’s hear your best dad joke.
Oh, I have so many. I mean, like, have you guys ever tried to eat a clock? It’s very time consuming. Oh.
Especially when you go back for seconds.
Oh my what do you call a guy with no shins?
I don’t know.
What do you not yeah.
Let’s see.
Do you call a guy with no shins?
Tony.
Tony because he’s got toes.
We’re both and almost like in my head. Okay.
Cool. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Hello. Oh, knee.
Yeah. Okay. Duh. Got it.
Okay. Cool. We can get this started.
Hello. Thank you, for the dad joke. Loved it. Again, my name is Chelsea. This is my friend Ted.
He will be hosting a bulk of this presentation. We can go to the next slide. I’ll just kind of go over some housekeeping stuff. So this session is gonna be recorded.
So you’ll have all of this information after. There will be transcription. You can read through it however you wanna do that. I’ll send this over after the recording’s processed.
You’ll get this in your email. So you can drop any questions. I’m glad that everyone kind of knows how to use the chat.
We also have questions. It’s in the tab. You can use the audience chat just to, like for little things during the presentation, but then chat for, like, specific questions. We’ll have QA at the end, so we’ll get to all of those once we wrap up.
Everyone will be muted just to keep things clean. But you can, yeah, engage the chat, drop any reactions, to engage. We’re gonna aim for about forty five minutes of content, give or take, and then we’ll have fifteen minutes of q and a. And we can go to the next one.
Okay. Ted, me, he’s a technical. I’m marketing.
Best summary.
The agenda will go, yeah, just like on data, best practices type things, operational confidence without adding additional overhead, capture options, how you should choose, and then how you’re gonna turn that data into decisions. And then the last section is my favorite q and a. We will get to chat with you. All of it will be answered. And if we don’t have the answer, I will follow-up. So with that, I will pass it to Ted, and we’ll start with a poll.
Yeah. Absolutely. So as as we get started right before this poll, as Chelsea gets the poll all situated. My name is Ted. I’m one of the technical support engineers here at Propeller.
I’ve been in the industry for years, and I’ve been working with drones for about eight.
And the first big question that we wanted to ask was, how does your team currently track their monthly earthwork? Do you do it with drone surveying and process it yourself? Do you manually do any kind of measurements with, like, a base and a rover tracking via spreadsheets? Do you use truck counts or or weights truck weights, or do you third party it out?
And let’s look at the reviews.
Fantastic. So it looks like some of you oh, starting to come in.
Here we go.
Four votes, five votes. I was about to say, oh, wow. It’s a fifty fifty split, but there’s only two votes.
We’re getting there.
We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
Okay. We’re getting some trends now.
Yeah. Absolutely. So what it looks like is so when you’re doing it manually or, like, if doing manual or if you’re mostly reactive, the how much of that time of rework and misalignment and overfilling or underfilling on designs does that usually take up part of your day? Is that something that you find yourself doing more and more, or are you have you been in this industry for long enough that you can just on the nose at every single time? Because I know I can’t.
What that’s really where ProPolar comes into play. It helps those teams capture better data and communicate it clearly from the office to the people in the field to the shareholders so that they can make decisions faster and have it be less disputed.
And we’ll go to the next slide.
So and, Chelsea, I have to keep the slides up entirely. So if something happens or anything else, feel free to just let me know.
Gotcha. Will do. Okay.
So getting into here.
So better data for leaner jobs. What we mean by leaner jobs is, you know, tight teams, lean and mean, small teams with limited time and overhead. We wanna show you how clearer, more frequent site visibility helps protect your margins and reduce your admin load. So with that being said, what does better data mean here? It means more frequent visibility, cleaner documentation, and easier alignment, like I mentioned, between field office and stakeholders.
So why does site transparency protect your margins and how that can happen?
So first, you gotta know your quantities and how they affect it. Faster checks means fewer late surprises. It means if you’re on-site and you have over, you know, a hundred some odd tons over and you have to truck that off, you can start planning those, so that you’re not surprised with a surprise bill or vice versa. If you need to truck in and find a hundred tons or a thousand tons somewhere to make sure that you’re all nice and level and the gradings where they need to be, you can plan ahead, find that dirt, and schedule those trucks as each phase of our progress goes about. You don’t have to be consistently surprised by those quantities.
You can be a whole lot more fluid and a lot more flexible when it comes to doing those checks if you if you have that data. Now it also makes those billing conversations easier.
Every single time that you have a survey or make measurements, and all of that data lives in Propeller with a time stamp and shows exactly who and when and where those teams have created that data. So they have those shared records. So whenever a dispute comes up saying, you left it here on this date, you can go exactly to the the Propeller platform and show exactly what day and time and place you were, with that phase. So if a phase is completed, you always know, and everybody’s always within the loop. When you’re keeping those scope changes, you show exactly when it changed and what it impacts. So as site phases continue on, when you go from phase one to phase two or phase three to phase four, you will always have that clear site record.
And hidden admin overhead is a big phrase for chasing updates. Right? So there’s always going to be a difference between what you see in the field versus what the office and the bean counters are looking at on spreadsheets. All that Propeller can do is it can bridge that gap.
It’s less time chasing the measurements that you need. It’s less screenshots that are sent via text and more consistent up updates so that you can keep your, your trucks moving. Nobody’s ever going to be sitting idle waiting for an update or waiting to see where they’re going. That hidden admin immediately can save you gas by keeping you on the job and less idle.
So when we’re going into oh, that was the wrong side. Sorry.
So in this so how do we actually do that in the Propeller platform?
So building that confidence without adding any kind of overview, we’re going to go into how to compare to designs from office to real world, how to verify your quantities, how Propeller tracks progress over time, and how sharing that site picture with the right people can really decrease on the added overhead as well as keeping you nimble and the total situational awareness of the whole organization. Because that’s the thing. When you’re in a lean, mean team, everybody has to wear multiple hats. Right? So it’s not just somebody in the office, but it’s somebody in the office who can go out on-site and has to check things. It’s not just one person jumping in a truck. It’s one person jumping in a truck and then checking grade.
Everybody’s always doing multiple things, and so Propeller is a tool that allows you to do that.
So when we’re checking work against a design, as long as everything’s in the same coordinate system, you can absolutely it gives you a live snapshot of the current conditions of the site. You compare reality to the design so the issues show up earlier. If you’re above grade or you’re high in the in the upper right corner of the job, you know exactly how and when and how much you are high in, whether it’s tonnage or volume no matter what you work in. And you can combine that with our site materials to see say if a truck holds fifty yards of dirt, you can immediately know, okay. I have three hundred yards that’s all on this side, and I know exactly how many trucks that I need to schedule and what that’s gonna cost.
So you you can use it at key phases, as I mentioned. It’s not just at the beginning, at the end. If you’re flying and collecting data, it’s easier and easier to do that. Every single person that has a phone can collect data and update these this information, which means that even at key phases, every week, every day, you can get exactly where and show that progress as you guys are going along.
You can share the site picture with the right people, so on and so forth. Alright. So you with that, we’ll go to the next one. So how do we do that with verifying quantities?
So we talked about comparing to a design, but, also, if you wanna see if a shareholder says, hey. You used a thousand gallons of diesel last month. How much dirt did you actually end up moving? You can now with Propeller, if you’re flying and collecting data as as often as you can and with every person enabled to do that, you can calculate volumes that are from every single every single flight and every single data collection.
We can see the surveys in place. We can see the changing between phases, what changed and when, and we can use that record to support our billing, our change orders, and our dispute resolution. The big the big takeaway here is that the field in the office and the shake stairhold stakeholders, sorry, are grounded in the same timeline and context when it comes to this.
So with that, pardon me, like we were just talking about comparing over time, when we review those surveys, it is really it’s insurance. Right? Is I don’t know how many times that you guys have had any kind of disputes or dispute conversations when it comes to at the end of a phase or during a handover or anything else like that, and it’s always he shed, she shed.
The the big thing that Propeller and that we often hear from, smaller, sized organizations is this Propeller will say will pay for itself in the first dispute is I don’t know how many times that you guys have, had a change order or a dispute where you have to go back onto site and move use your fuel, use your, your people, and every and take your time when in all actuality, you could have been right on grade. And from here, not only can you, make those disputes a thing of the past, but it keeps you and your team as honest and, allows you guys to move faster when you’re not when you take out all of the guesswork.
Now oh, that was a there we go. Share site and picture. So now we’re gonna get when we start talking about the different capture options, the a lot of the times when you’re looking at drones and how you process them, one of the big things that Propeller does is it is a centralized hub. Right?
So with our mobile app, with our Dirtmates, with our external hardware, you can do everything you can share the necessary context around the job. It’s not just straight numbers. It’s not numbers on a spreadsheet. You can take photos, anytime.
One of the ones that comes to mind is, there was a clearing that was rained out for two weeks straight, and no progress had been done.
With Propeller, not only if you wouldn’t be able to, fly a drone, you can take a picture and upload it to Propeller with a time stamp and say, hey. It was the job was entirely flooded for the last two weeks, and every single day was a photo, and here it is geo locked and with a time stamp. It gives you those receipts and shares the necessary context so that when you come to the stakeholders, when you come to the people that are paying for this job, they know exactly where the numbers are coming from and why they are. It helps everyone work from the same site picture. It reduces those back, those back and forths. And, with real live photos, our new walk throughs, and site scans, it reduces overall site visits. Some of the people that would have had to come to the site every single day can then save gas, save time by only visiting in a week and checking in with the site, from from the office.
It allows more people to wear the the multitude of hats that a lean mean team can.
So with that, we’ll go over some of the capture options because I was very, very clear on how with that poll, there are some of you that are flying with drones.
But now that we’ve covered how drones can be used in our office data, let’s talk about different ways to capture. Different jobs need different capture methods.
Drone baselines is kind of the gold standard and has been for the last ten some odd years, but handheld capture and some of the new hardware that we’re rolling out and have been rolling out for the last year, allow for continuous site insights. So coming to the next poll, how does your crew in the field, those that are using drones versus not using drones, completely out of the drone topic, how do you typically communicate project updates?
And I’ll let Chelsea jump in and oh, Launched it.
But I can go through the different options. So we thought would be typical, but also if not, you can throw your answer in the chat. But phone calls and text messages, email with photos attached, going back to the office for an in person update, or not a reliable built out system, so updates can fall through the cracks sometimes.
Those were what we have or if you have anything else in the chat, but it’s coming our way.
Thanks, Chelsea. Yeah. So with that, it looks like emails with attached photos is a great a great way to update for that site context like we were talking about. But with those, it can I’m sure you guys can help can realize how hard to keep context organized and searchable with just emails and photos. Email threads can get very, very long. You can lose them depending on what what it’s highlighted as.
Hopefully, the ultimate goal is a reliable flow of site context, not more messages that can, just end up as noise. Right?
So like we mentioned, right capture methods depend on the job. So drone surveying, it’s best for the full site baselines.
We the drone surveying itself has been proven to be high accuracy. It GPS topo on open earthwork sites. It works for third party pilots as well as owning the drone yourself. Drone surveying specifically is a strong fit for periodic vault volume tracking, end of the month reconciliation, and site wide cut and fills.
But drone surveying isn’t the end all be all nowadays.
You can get a Vidoc now that has super high accuracy GNSS built right in so that it can accurately, right on your phone, allow you to use photogrammetry, the same process that we do with drone surveying in the palm of your hand. So a handheld scanning, you can then go for if you need if you know that you’re gonna be flying that site week to week or month to month and not day to day, you guys are moving a lot of dirt. If you’re doing utilities, those trenches aren’t gonna be open for weeks on end. Those trenches are gonna be open only for a day or so.
But if your team is has those handheld scanning options available to them, they can scan the the open trench with their phone, process that data through Propeller, and update the drone survey before before that those those trenches even get filled so that you, again, have that systematic documentation for the gotchas. Even even if it’s something as simple as making sure that your guys aren’t digging into already buried utilities, The mobile app gives everybody such incredible site awareness, and its ease of use, right, is not everybody knows how to fly a drone. Not everybody has a drone, but everybody has a phone, and almost everybody knows how to use it.
So with Propeller Mobile, it makes getting site context easier to access in the field. It’s a faster onboarding. You don’t have to get a part one zero seven. You don’t have to learn how to fly a drone or plan a mission or anything else.
You download the app, log in with your existing Propeller credentials, and you immediately have access to all of your projects and your surveys by date.
And in addition, even without precise GNSS, you can do three sixty walk throughs for the best context of a site visit, the exact context of a site visit that you would get otherwise.
You can use your phone as a full site walk through to see exactly site site context. There are no access barriers. You can capture dense act high accuracy point clouds wherever sky visibility and drone paths are restricted.
Okay. So like I said, super easy. You download the app. You log in, and then you can access your sites.
And it actually will put you directly on your project using your phone’s GPS, which means you can actually see exactly where you’re at. Turning on any kind of designs, it the site visibility and site awareness has never been never been easier.
But in addition, you can do spot elevations, point designs, full measurements, and look at where you are on-site. So the communication between between the field and the office become almost seamless. You can upload those photos, and instead of sending them in an email, you can send a photo, upload it to the site, and it’s geotagged exactly where it was taken. So if, somebody is, if you’re having a safety walk through, safety walk through can go through, take all of the photos of the safety projects, turn it into a list, and it is now visible for everybody on Propeller’s site so that they can check it off one by one so that it makes audits super, super easy.
And then with markup and layers, just with just like with that, if you are trying to plan out a site or need to make little markups or notes on on a visible map through the app, you can then, scroll and markup on whatever iPad that you’re using so that the the team inside can see exactly what, what you’re thinking and, manage those measurement layers.
Okey dokey. And then finally, the after three sixty walkthrough or anything else like or the, excuse me, three sixty walkthrough or point cloud capture with your phone, Finally, the last tool that we have is this Dirt Mate. It’s our last piece of our latest piece piece of hardware, and it is truly the Swiss army knife of dirt work materials. So it’s a plug and play. So it is a a self contained unit that’s a high accuracy GNSS that can then be slapped on anything.
You can put it on your machines. Like, if you put it on a scraper, it takes under fifteen minutes. No no wiring, no drilling, no downtime. It’s a literal, it’s a high accuracy magnet that can take up to ten g’s of force and not move. It’ll give you position, and machine state in one device, meaning it’ll tell when the when the machine’s on, when it’s idling, and when it’s in motion.
It’s a continued continuous data broadcasting. It broadcasts anywhere there’s four g. So if you have cell service on your site, that means you can get real time position updates to your platform every time that this Dirt Mate goes around.
So every time what this the bread and butter of this is its quick insights. Right? So every thirty minutes, the surface is, updated. So it uses, the length between where the Dirt Mate is to the base of whatever machine that it’s on. So every time that it runs over something, it gives you an updated surface. There’s no need to fly the drone every single day to track those things. You can then use that Dirt Mate to make sure that everything is updated and lives in that platform.
But in addition to that, it automatically loads it automatically logs load and fill cycles, which means the the days of manual clickers and stopwatches are a thing of the past. You immediately can see how long one how long your cycles are taking, where your drivers are going, and how long they’re still sitting idle.
The days of, hey. You’ve used a thousand gallons of diesel but only moved x number of yards.
Why is that? Now they see exactly how much time that you’re spending in each cycle, how much time that your operators are spending idle. And if there is any wasted diesel, you can know exactly where it is and, be on top of that. So you’re not surprised with a surprise bill when you have to go get more more, send more machines towards your the end of your job. Sorry. Complete brain fart.
So sticking the the machine, the Dirt Mate onto the machine, you’re connecting your field and your office. Now with that, we can come into here. This is the latest bit, the the rework. So with that same machine that was sticking on top of and giving you machine sites, you can actually take it off, put it onto a scraper, and you can get is this oh, no. This is the other one. Give me one more. Uh-oh.
Next.
Okay.
So this is our, in cab view. So it uses that real time position, and you can turn on, whatever phase that you’re on. So if you’re on phase one or phase two and see full cut few cut fill cues and design overlays whenever it’s appropriate. It can it is a supports consistent execution and reduces that rework risk daily and in real time.
So you can see here, it’s on smaller jobs. This can be an alternative to machine control, but it’s not exactly, not every small job facilitates or has the budget for machine control. This can be a placeholder. It can tell you within, a couple of tenths exactly if you’re on grade or if you’re not on grade just by having something removable that you can swap between trucks.
But then in addition, you can then use the point capture and stakeout right on the same machine. So you can pull it off of you can pull it off of a machine, put it on a pole, and it acts as a great way. So this is what our mobile app looks like.
I did this again. There we go. Cool.
So you can use this as a way to stake out, a way to make measurements, and check grade specifically on a pole like you would with a rover.
These things are significantly less expensive than, say, a full basin rover setup, which means not only do you have to worry about making sure that every job actually has accurate ground control or any kind of stakeout, but it also is simple it’s simple to use. You don’t have to have a survey degree to set up these these machines. It’s significantly more simple. Anyone, you just saw how easy it was to connect your phone to a Dirt Mate, which means then you can then take shots, you can stake out, you can make sure that you’re on grade, and then stick it to the top of your your car or your truck as you’re doing your site visit, run around, and check grade, as quick as possible. It like I was mentioning, it is the ultimate Swiss Army knife, of a GPS tool.
Okay.
So to recap, we talked about, the drone baselines for snapshots, the mobile handheld for quick and flexible updates, and then finally, the ultimate Swiss army knife, Dirt Mate for machine driven insights, as well as an in cab view and a stakeout and point capture. So how do these lean teams turn this site data into decisions without adding overhead?
It allows you to quantity quickly quantify your your tight earthworks.
It allows progress documentation for GC GCs and stakeholders, and it allows you to catching a grade issue before the crew moves on. If you’re working in a particular site in phase one and you come over, it isn’t days later, it isn’t weeks later that you find that you’re two hundred mil low on a subbase. You can and have to send all of your crew back. You can know those those results in real time from day to day so that the the communication from in in the office to the site is nearly seamless.
Okay.
And with that, I think we have any sort of question a.
Yes. Okay. So there’s button on the side. You can submit your questions. So I’ll give a couple of minutes. We have one right now.
But anything, we have some extra time. And if we don’t expand for the rest of the thirty minutes, we can cut it early. But, yeah, feel free to send our way.
Cool. So the first one I have is we’re pretty reactive today and don’t really know that our quantities are off until a problem pops up. What’s the first workflow you you recommend using to, like, tighten up that process?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I kind of went over it, and we can kind of go back here.
So first and foremost, if you aren’t using drone surveying, drone surveying really is that golden standard for the baseline, right, is if you’re doing weekly or monthly surveying back to back to back, you have those drone receipts. You have that geospatial snapshot that’s highly accurate that can give you those receipts to show progress moving month end of month reconciliation. You can track how much volume that you’re moving per gallon of diesel, and you can do site wide cut fill progress tracking depending on what phase you’re in of of whatever build site that you’re on.
Did that I think that answered your question. If not, feel free to put will.
Yeah. Awesome.
Cool. Thank you. Yeah. The next one is we’re using photos and emails right now. When using Propeller, what part of that communication workflow is typically replaced.
Yeah. Absolutely. So like I said with the mobile app, and I’ll come back over here so that we can see this guy. So I’m a pause the video. So this little yellow button right here and as you can see, on on a site, it does use your phone’s GPS, and it puts you exactly where where you think that where it thinks you are on-site.
It uses real time position in your phone, puts you on-site so you can get those real lifetime position updates. So you can then use that little yellow and capture a photo and tag any users that are in the platform. You can at them so that they will get a notification on the day of with a photo capture that lives in perpetuity on the site. So it’s no longer is a photo gonna get trapped in an email thread six emails back. Now every single time that somebody logs on to Propeller, they can go into the media tab and see all of the photo updates throughout the entirety of the process with time stamps and captions.
Nice. Cool. Thank you.
I only have one more question right now, so start to do them my way. But, yeah, the last one I have is we sometimes bring in third party surveyors but not on a consistent schedule.
How how can we decide when it’s worth capturing the progress more regularly?
I mean, drone surveying is and propeller in general is never gonna replace a a survey crew in general, and it shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement. It’s more of a supplement. Right? Is you have your you have your original survey that comes out, sets your property boundaries, gives you your your baselines, gives you your known points if you’re gonna do a localization.
But then from then on, you can then use all of that data that they gave you, and you can stretch it further. You can set up your site as a localization so that all of the the stuff that is in the design works lays directly onto your propeller. You can then use that to track your progress. Every single flight is then going to be tied back to that localization so that anything that you make in propeller can be exported and put into any other CAD program.
You can give it to the surveyors. You can give it to the next contractors and say, hey. At at May twenty eighth, this is what the site this is how we left it. These are the grades.
These are this is how it compares to the designs.
Here’s the proof that we fulfilled our end of the bargain.
Awesome. Thank you. Okay. The next one.
So you reference large scale mass earthwork projects. If you’re on a smaller project and want to use the scan scanning for small piles less than, a thousand cubic meters, is the data processing instant? And then what is the processing cost?
I actually don’t know what the processing cost is, but it is it is pretty quick. So we can process handheld scans, high accuracy handheld scans, as long as you have that additional GNSS corrections on your phone. We can process those scans in usually around an hour and get that data back to you with GPS accuracy, so about a tenth to two tenths. Or if you’re doing piles, anywhere between ten percent accuracy as far as volume is concerned.
So on small jobs like that, you can scan it with your phone, get it back within within the day, and get those live accurate updates.
Okay. Cool. Thank you. And then our next one is, can the DirtMate calibrate to project coordinates?
Yeah. Absolutely. So any any coordinate system so if you’re on a localization, any localization that you set up in Propeller can be used on your DirtMate. So you can localize. You can make sure that the DirtMate is collecting in local, and you can do stakeouts. You can make measurements. You can take points.
Great. Thank you.
Depending on that, depending on your rover and how you have it set up, you can actually connect your your DirtMate specifically to an existing base station. As long as it’s able to stream those NTRIP connections over the Internet, the DirtMate has an SD card onboard, so it’ll be able to fetch those connections and give you real time updates even if it’s connected to your, you know, existing base.
Okay. Great.
And then hold on.
Okay. And then what is the accuracy of Dirt Mate on a machine?
So if you’re talking about the Dirt Mate surfaces, we try to say around two to three tenths if it’s just doing DirtMate.
If you’re doing DirtMate RTK, so I e the in cab, that accuracy because it’s actively being corrected, it drops it down to that those real live updates are within two tenths is what we we like to say because that’s guaranteed survey accuracy. But very often, it’s it’s well within a tenth.
Cool. Thank you. I don’t have any other questions on my end right now. We can give it another minute or two. We have plenty of time, but I appreciate all of those questions. Very good stuff and happy to follow-up with any yeah. If you have additional questions.
Man, I ripped through those slides. I thought I was gonna be over.
I don’t know.
Yeah.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I never I’m upset about getting time back in my In your day.
Yeah. But I am writing these. So if we hate that, then let me know.
True. Very true.
Alright. Well, I don’t think we’re getting any other questions. So, Chelsea, thank you for this opportunity. And everybody on here, if you guys do have questions, we can absolutely jump back on follow-up and give you any of the more information that you need.
Totally. And then yeah. And if this is something that you’d like to talk, with more and, like, a more in-depth conversation, there is a book, a fifteen minute consult, somewhere above our heads button, I believe. Let me know if that’s missing, and then you can schedule a quick consult with one of our team members.
They’ll tailor it more to your situation and then kind of talk you even more in-depth on, like, best options and what makes the most sense. But with that, I’m going to yeah. I’m gonna clean up this video after. I will shoot it in all of your inboxes shortly.
And thanks for attending. Hope you all have a lovely day, and thank you, Ted.
Thanks, guys. Bye.
