Why Software Is aNecessity for Road and Highway ConstructionDon’t Be Left Behind: How Innovative Software Allows Construction Companies to Keep up in Today’s Road and Highway Infrastructure Landscape

Table of Contents4 Road and Highway Infrastructure

The Landscape Today

Funding and the Government

The Unique Challenges of Infrastructure

8 Software and Infrastructure: Can It Be Better?How Software Helps

What Does This Mean for Construction Teams?

10 Stopping Roadblocks with Whitman Requardt & Associates and the Virginia DOT

12 Autodesk Construction Cloud™

13 Conclusions

14 References

Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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At the core of a healthy economy, you’ll find a thriving infrastructure. Without proper infrastructure, many workers wouldn’t get to their jobs easily. Some communities would struggle and be stranded, with little opportunity for economic growth. Trade would halt, and businesses would struggle without people to power their operations.1

The potential for innovation in the transportation industry is obvious, and a reliable infrastructure system is vital in our modern economy. But the construction of roads and highways comes with its own set of challenges. Transportation is often underfunded, and construction teams have to communicate between disciplines and across vast distances. The right technology can allow companies to close gaps in communication while paving the way for our modern transportation landscape.

Introduction

Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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Road and Highway InfrastructureThe world has continued to see growing demands on road and highway infrastructure. In the United States alone, there are over four million miles of roads and highways.2 These roads are vital in connecting workers to businesses, which stimulates the economy. According to the US Census, the typical commuter now spends 20 more minutes a week commuting than they did a decade ago. Over the course of a year, it works out to about 17 additional hours commuting.

Traffic congestion alone costs Americans $166 billion a year due to lost time and increased fuel costs, according to a Texas A&M study. Managing this thoughtfully is a substantial responsibility for road and highway infrastructure. To support this network of commuters, the Federal Highway Administration and Departments of Transportation (DOTs) spend vast amounts of money. In 2017, state DOTs spent $19.04 billion in overall transit funding, and federal funds totaled $11.88 billion. In that same year, state and local governments spent 6% of direct general spending on road and highway infrastructure, to the tune of $181 billion.3

The Landscape Today

At both the state and local levels, road and highway infrastructure is routinely a top source of direct general spending.3 The Federal Reserve estimates the return on infrastructure spending to be $1.5 to $3 for every dollar invested, a figure certified by the International Monetary Fund.4 Yet, in the United States, infrastructure spending makes up about 2.5% of the economy.1 That number is 3.9% in Canada, Australia, and South Korea; 5% in Europe; and between 9% and 12% in China.1 While the importance of infrastructure to our economic growth is widely accepted, there is still a gap in investment that must be closed by innovation.

Today’s climate rewards innovators, those who find ways to do more with less. Owners, general contractors, subcontractors, and managers who rise to the challenge and build our infrastructure—despite a lack of funding—quickly become leaders in the field.

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Funding and the Government

There’s no way around it. To be a player in the world of road and highway infrastructure, companies must learn how to win government contracts. According to GovDirections, government contracts can be divided into eight categories:5

• Fixed-price contracts

• Negotiation

• Sealed bidding

• Labor-hour contracts

• Time and materials contracts

• Indefinite delivery contracts

• Incentive contracts

The application process varies. Incentive contracts, for example, motivate contractors to finish work sooner than agreed upon, while labor-hour contracts are used to pay the contractor per hour for the time it takes to finish their work. However, with very few exceptions, these government infrastructure contracts are almost exclusively awarded to the lowest bidder. Companies bidding

on government projects are almost always competing on price. Because of that, general contractors and subcontractors must be smart about bid leveling so they maximize profit and bid on projects that will make them money.

According to the World Economic Forum, worldwide infrastructure investment falls about $18 trillion short of the global investment need—with most of the gap falling directly in the road and electricity industries. The need is greater than ever. To win contracts in the realm of transportation, companies must cut costs and increase efficiency. That’s where innovative software comes in.

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Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

The Unique Challenges of Infrastructure

Interstate 90 is America’s longest interstate highway, stretching over 3,000 miles from Boston to Seattle. Communication on a project stretching end to end is unique to this field. Roadwork requires collaboration from multiple disciplines, including drainage experts, utility companies, and geotechnical engineers. Often, road construction takes place in phases; one stage of the project must be completed before moving on to the next. Companies must have a proven method to communicate and collaborate in order to avoid costly mistakes and delays in the process.

To lay a road, a construction company must coordinate teams, materials and equipment. Drainage systems and utilities must be mapped out, bridges blueprinted, and electric and

fiber-optic work, traffic signals, and cameras factored in—just to name a few. And, because roadwork takes place outside without cover, bad weather can become a big issue that throws off the construction schedule. Unlike commercial construction where you can often do parallel work, roadwork tends to be phased. Making progress often depends on finishing another job first.

Safety continues to be important, both on the construction site and on the road after the job is finished. From 2003–2017, there was an average of 123 fatal work-related injuries at road construction sites per year, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.6 Companies also face the challenge of building roads and highways that will hold up to a booming population and increasing commuter traffic as years pass.

Roadwork is often done in remote areas, where teams don’t have the connectivity enjoyed by commercial builders. Instead, they are out in the elements. The project trailer and the job location can be miles apart, and a long drive back and forth for plans and documents wastes time and money. Today, a Professional Engineer’s (PE) time is better spent on-site, not running errands from the jobsite to the trailer. For a road or highway infrastructure project to succeed, reliable software and the latest set of plans—always available both on and offline—is a non-negotiable.

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Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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Software and Infrastructure: Can It Be Better?The asphalt contractor Superior Bowen—responsible for paving a subdivision in Kansas City—were grateful to have access to high-tech construction software when they ran into an issue with city officials. The software allowed them to review work done by a subcontractor, and then show the city that the so-called problem was actually less severe than the officials had feared. In total, the software saved Superior Bowen tens of thousands of dollars and months of work.7

How Software Helps

Choosing the right software will allow you to complete a project safely, find and hire contractors, reduce mistakes, eliminate data silos, maintain completed projects, and create consistent workflows.

Finding the right subcontractors can make or break a successful bid and/or project. The right software allows you to access and then select subcontractors according to the specific needs of the project. You can compare bids side by side, plugging in numbers to easily edit values, and get results faster and more

efficiently. Analyzing subcontractor risk, annually or for a specific project, becomes much faster. Advanced risk profiles create a streamlined process, offering financial benchmarking, key metric calculations, capacity recommendations, and safety performance history.

Monitoring live data is one major way that companies can improve productivity on the jobsite. The right construction software will allow you to analyze and manage a large amount of data, keeping track of project progress and performance, weather conditions, and detailed

labor information. Personalized daily views allow you to identify teams that need attention, help them prioritize work each day, and keep them up to date on the project status. Access to live data also translates directly into safer conditions, as project management and operations can sift through information and spot issues, incidents, and trouble points such as congestion or poor traffic flow.8

Data silos can be a real problem for infrastructure projects. For example, subcontractors often track their own data separately. While they are required to report to the general

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contractor (GC), this information is still blocked off and dependent on the subcontractor to get through. This can lead to a bottleneck in information, slowing down productivity across the whole project.9

A centralized digital platform allows GCs to access information anywhere, anytime—whether online or offline. It reduces miscommunications and eliminates the need for subcontractors to explain information that could have been accessible to everyone from the beginning.9 A centralized software as a single source of truth is vital to the efficiency of road and highway construction.

Even when the project is complete, there is still monitoring and maintenance to be done. In 2017, 45% of state and local government highway and road infrastructure spending went toward costs such as maintenance, operation, and safety.3 The right technology software will allow changes to be made after the project is complete. It provides an interface where claims can be processed and handled seamlessly, and where project managers can assess data to make necessary changes.

What Does This Mean for Construction Teams?

The software’s data management capabilities have powerful ramifications for project management. By providing a user-friendly interface on which to share data in real time, software allows teams to communicate, solve problems, and streamline projects while reducing mistakes and saving time and money.8

Those same benefits can be used in the world of transportation—and with increased potential to reduce fatalities and injuries. After the project is completed, software can help identify infrastructure that needs improvement or replacement, reducing injuries while improving safety and traffic flow.8 Technology allows managers to offset the risk that their teams will be going off old or outdated information. Everyone keeps up to date easily.

Software takes the responsibility off the shoulders of superintendents and foremen, allowing them to spend more time in the field with their teams.

For project engineers, software allows them to streamline the distribution of information. Instead of having to communicate with individual subcontractors and other workers in the field, the project engineer simply has to upload information to the technology. It becomes a single source of truth that reduces the workload upfront, allowing project engineers to spend more time on the facets of the project that matter most.

Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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Stopping Roadblocks with Whitman Requardt & Associates and the Virginia DOTWhitman Requardt and Associates (WRA) uses Autodesk Construction Cloud to manage clients and contractors while also coordinating closely with design and field teams across all phases of construction. A regular client is the Virginia DOT, a $3.5 billion government agency, so coordination and collaboration are key. “One of the challenges in heavy civil construction, and also in construction management, is interfacing with everybody on the project team: the engineer, the owner, the contractor, and the inspection team. Striking the balance between resolving everyone’s issues and delivering a project is a daily challenge. We deliver quality. When we build a roadway meant to last a hundred years, it will last for a hundred years,” says Leonard Coleman, Associate for Construction Management Services at WRA.

“We took one project with over 300 punch list items and closed it out in 30 days. A previous contract had over 600 items, and without PlanGrid it took us almost six months. The proof is in the numbers. We’re just able to turn things around very quickly by using PlanGrid.”

– Leonard Coleman, P.E.Associate for Construction Management Services, Whitman Requardt and Associates

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Improving communication saves time and money

Effective coordination means everyone must work from the same set of plans. “Before PlanGrid, we noticed on several of our projects that the inspection team would have one set of plans, and the contractor had another set, and then, all the while, the designer and the owner another one,” says Coleman.

WRA recognized that their biggest weakness was their lack of communication. To ensure everyone was working off the same information, WRA would improve communication and begin saving time and money.

Field collaboration drives new preconstruction and inspection workflows, saving time and money

Before PlanGrid, WRA would receive calls from their clients requesting photos and updates on the contractor or issues. Now, a client (often Virginia DOT) has direct access to the same PlanGrid project, where they instantly see the project information. Not only

that, but contractors can quickly access the issues and begin work right away. “The contractors we work with often say, ‘Hey I’m working off the same sheet as you guys. What are the issues out there? Where’s the punch list?’ We just show them the punch list in PlanGrid and they start working on it,” says Coleman. With everyone on the same page, PlanGrid reduced negative interactions between all parties, sped up the projects, and assured quality work.Coleman adds, “In preconstruction, we got our design team on board with PlanGrid. We showed them that they can overlay drawings in PlanGrid and find conflicts.” Having designers interact more closely with construction managers in the field makes for a better client experience.Saving the client money, especially a large government agency, helps WRA win more work. Coleman says, “They really took a liking to that. And I can assure you that when the time comes around for the contract to get a bid, they’ll be looking at products that can save them time and money.”

Ensuring safety and winning more work

In road and highway construction, safety is first and foremost. Coleman measures success on the job by everybody getting home safely.As he drives through the jobsite on his way home, he conducts his own inspection using PlanGrid. “I’m looking at everything under the moon, not only including the road, but around the jobsite. If anything looks unsafe, whether for my folks, the contractor, or the traveling public, I stop on the side of the road and I get the contractors’ attention.”

WRA uses PlanGrid for construction management across the construction lifecycle and it has become a necessary tool for managing client and contractor relationships. As a proven solution that speeds up projects, saves money, and ensures safety on the jobsite, PlanGrid is a tool that WRA relies on to impress clients and win more work.

Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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Autodesk Construction Cloud™

Autodesk Construction Cloud™ supports infrastructure teams across the construction lifecycle. It offers innovative ways of quantification, bidding, qualification, project management, and field collaboration through a full set of tools and workflows.

Autodesk Construction Cloud relieves the infrastructure industry the pain of driving between jobsites while collaborating with different trades and disciplines. Instead, the software acts as a single source of truth to contain end-to-end project lifecycles. It digitally captures, stores, and transfers everything needed across the full construction lifecycle.

Many major highway infrastructure projects are built using Autodesk Construction Cloud, including the North Coast Corridor Project outside San Diego, and a $232.6 million project on Wisconsin’s

busiest freeway. Trusted by leaders in infrastructure construction, it also provides a completely secure location for cloud collaboration—which is especially valuable for large government agencies and their contractors who require enterprise-grade security. Not only that, but DOTs budget billions of dollars for highway maintenance every year. With Autodesk Construction Cloud, DOTs create a historical record that lives on after each project, creating a library of all projects, housed in one central location.

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ConclusionThe infrastructure construction market is split into three categories: rail infrastructure; road infrastructure; and other infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, tunnels, dams, dikes, subways, and mass transit. Infrastructure construction accounted for 11% of the total US construction industry in 2018, and the market is set to expand by 6.8% from 2014–2023.10

We live in a world of increasing connectivity. As the population grows, so does the need for efficient, safe, and modern infrastructure. Companies in road and highway construction face a set of challenges. How do they keep costs low enough to stay competitive in a world of government contracts without sacrificing safety measures? How do they avoid data silos when working with multidisciplinary teams? And how do they keep innovation alive while monitoring the massive amounts of data required to make large-scale projects work?

The answer to all of this lies in technology. The right software will allow your company to pivot in a modern climate without losing innovation, efficiency, and reliability. There has never been a better time to begin implementing software into your workflow. Companies that don’t adopt these measures will surely be left behind.

Why Software Is a Necessity for Road and Highway Construction

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References[1] Why Infrastructure Matters: Rotten Roads, Bum Economy

Robert Puentes, January 20, 2015

[2] Policy and Governmental Affairs Office of Highway Policy Information, 2011

[3] Highway and Road Expenditures Urban Institute, 2011

[4] Improving America’s Infrastructure Starts with Laying the Groundwork for Innovation Dustin DeVan, February 12, 2020

[5] Types of Government Contracts Mark Knowles, April 23, 2015

[6] Highway Work Zones Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), n.d.

[7] Autodesk Improves Efficiency at Superior Bowen AsphaltPro Staff, n.d.

[8] The Construction Innovation Needed to Solve America’s Infrastructure Crisis Grace Ellis, January 29, 2019

[9] Why Subs Can’t Afford to Leave Data Behind PlanGrid

[10] Infrastructure investment to drive total construction output in China Global Data, November 20, 2019

In 2018, Autodesk announced that construction would be a key focus area to help our customers on their design and make journey. To capitalize on the opportunity, Construction became its own CEO-staff level organization, Autodesk Construction Solutions. This unique structure is comprised of product development, customer success, marketing, and field operations. The organization is designed to move at the speed of the market and serve customers on a level playing field with other solution providers. Autodesk Construction Solutions offers products that cover the entire construction lifecycle, from design through plan to build and operate, including the Autodesk Construction Cloud which brings together our cloud-based solutions Assemble, BIM 360, BuildingConnected and PlanGrid. Our vision is to create a vibrant construction industry where predictability and productivity are exponentially increased, while jobsite waste is proportionately reduced. The time has come for platform that will empower an industry transformation. Our mission is to help construction teams meet the world’s rapidly expanding building and infrastructure needs, while making construction more predictable, safe and sustainable.

See the Future of Connected Constructionconstruction.autodesk.com

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