Customer Spotlight: WL Contracting-Competitive Bidding with SmartTrack

We recently sat down with William Lorenz of WL Contracting, a heavy civil construction company based out of San Antonio, Texas, to talk about the value that AGTEK products, especially SmartTrack, have brought to his projects. Specializing in mass earthmoving of more than a million cubic yards, WL Contracting has a fleet of scrapers and has been successful in their region moving mass dirt on big jobs.

Talking about his introduction to AGTEK, Williams says, “I was first introduced to AGTEK back in 2011 working for another employer. He had a lot of GPS technology but not a lot of know-how, so reaching out to my professional network I contacted a gentleman who was a model builder and he introduced me to how to use AGTEK to do the takeoff side of things. We went from outsourcing AGTEK to a third-party model builder to using it primarily for model building.”

At WL Contracting today, William says, “I have a takeoff guy that works in-house for us. He has used AGTEK for the last 30 years, we also have an estimator with over 30 years of experience using AGTEK. I don't know how we could function in our day-to-day takeoff world, as well as the model building the world with all the job sites we have, without AGTEK. It's streamlined, it's so fast, and so user-friendly compared to other applications that we've tried to use. I don't know how we could go any other direction now.”

Click here to watch William's full story.

Talking about his introduction to AGTEK, Williams says, “I was first introduced to AGTEK back in 2011 working for another employer. He had a lot of GPS technology but not a lot of know-how, so reaching out to my professional network I contacted a gentleman who was a model builder and he introduced me to how to use AGTEK to do the takeoff side of things. We went from outsourcing AGTEK to a third-party model builder to using it primarily for model building.”

The data has proven important. William says, “We found that the data from what our guys were clicking was very deceiving. SmartTrack had evidence that this guy ran faster, this guy had more production, this guy stopped longer. There was undeniable data, and we really liked the mobility that my foreman could see. During lunch he could pull the app up on his phone and see exactly how many loads each tractor hauled, so he could compare–you're five loads behind on this six-hour run in the morning. What's wrong? We were able to really pinpoint which part of production was falling behind and it's really worked out great for us, especially on long hauls. We could guess exactly how many feet we had in the haul based on a pickup truck running the mileage before, but with the SmartTrack app you're able to tell exact footage on that haul so we're really able to delineate a 2,000-foot haul from a 2,500-foot haul from a 3,000-foot haul. It’s helped us to know what our production truly every day is.

Our foremen in the field use the SmartTrack app every day on job sites that have long haul distances where they run scrapers. They found that they could use historical data that the app stores so they can go back daily and see exactly what they did. It's very user-friendly to be able to track and adjust quantities based on a drone survey.”

When asked about the impact of SmartTrack, William says, “One of the best benefits we've seen from using SmartTrack as a business is we're able to be more competitive on bids by having historical data of what we can move on job sites based on different haul distances. In the past, we had just our rudimentary ways of estimating that we said we were going to move X number of cubic yards when we now have data that proves we could move more with the same equipment allowing us to be more competitive with the equipment that we own and be able to be more competitive in the market that we're in.

Getting started was easy. William says, “It did not take us very long at all to implement SmartTrack. We had some great training, that's something that's very good about AGTEK, they have some very good customer support and very good training. I would say within a week we were up and running, very educated on how to use the SmartTrack app as well as the data that we could retrieve out of it. All our foremen were able to use it as well, it was very simple. There are a lot of technologies out there that make things harder than they need to be, but AGTEK has always been very user-friendly. We're very appreciative that they've made it easy for field-level guys to be able to use their products very accurately.”

Click here to learn more about SmartTrack.

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