Case Study 1 - Edmund Nuttall Limited

Edmund Nuttall Limited is one of the UK's leading civil engineering contractors and part of the European Construction Group, Hollandsche Beton Groep nv (HBG). John Gaskin, Applications Planning Engineer has been using LSS since 1989 and told us how LSS helps in the day to day monitoring of his most critical sites.
"We use LSS on four types of contract. Firstly, on contaminated land and land reclamation contracts, where the material being moved is expensive. Secondly, for sea defences when armouring is used and precision is required. Thirdly, for road contracts where the earthworks element is significant, and finally for estimating purposes, to help determine a commercially advantageous bid for fixed price contracts."

In describing how he uses LSS, John says. "LSS is a worthwhile, powerful system. An 'Expert' system, easy to use once you know what you are doing." In this respect, he says that it is like AutoCAD, but in many respects is easier to use. John has adopted a 'best of breed' approach to his engineering design and monitoring needs, which means that he uses a number of tools to achieve the results he needs on what are invariably complex jobs. He uses LSS for survey and earthworks monitoring and design and praises the system for its precision and ease of use. With so many different systems in use, John in particular benefits from the data conversion facilities that LSS offers. When asked what he believed to be the single most important benefit of LSS, John said. "The major benefits of LSS are that you always know what is happening on quantities."
Everyone talks about quality of service and guaranteed response. However, at McCarthy Taylor we believe that we give the best possible level of support to our users, but don't take our word for it, just read what John Gaskin thinks. "It's not very often that we have problems, and even less often that there's anything wrong with the software, but when we need help the support is very good." John considers reliability and performance extremely important and is delighted that the Windows version is proving strong in both respects.

As if an illustration of the power and flexibility of the software was necessary, the variety of projects on which Nuttall rely on LSS continues to grow. Recently, the British Airways Prospect Park contract involved the excavation and transfer of 2million cubic metres of material, half of which was landfill. The remediation of the site included transfer to parkland, and the preparation of 15 hectares for the new BA Combined Business Centre. In spite of the quantities involved, no materials were imported or exported.

Case Study 2 - Alfred McAlpine Civil Engineering

In this case study we look at how David James, Senior Engineer with Alfred McAlpine Civil Engineering (Western Division) utilises the latest software technology to help win earthworks contracts and monitor progress on existing ones. He describes how site-based software needs to be flexible enough to cope with the rigours of the tendering process and robust and reliable enough to adapt when non-standard questions are being asked mid-contract. With several contracts on the go at any one time, he needs technology that is both reliable and fast and relatively quick to learn as one of his jobs is to instruct new engineers in the use of the software.

Armed with a laptop, David moves around the country setting-up new and managing existing earthworks contracts and has come to rely heavily on one piece of software in particular - LSS, which is written and supported by McCarthy Taylor Systems Ltd. LSS is a terrain modelling, design and visualisation package, which in an independent survey last year was labelled the market leading survey and modelling package in the UK.

David has been with Alfred McAlpine since 1990 and an LSS user since 1994. His main task involves overseeing the earthworks aspects of many of McAlpine's largest contracts and have included the £430m Birmingham Northern Relief Road (M6 Toll).

"I use LSS for the earthworks measures on tenders and live contracts and I suppose the largest completed contract to date on which LSS was used was the M66 Denton to Medlock job, a 7km long, four lane motorway costing £120m." This was a joint venture with AMEC and the design was undertaken by Mouchel. The contract was completed in the Autumn of 2000.

"We used LSS throughout the tendering and construction phases of the contract and it proved invaluable given the complexity of the site and the amount of material involved. The total cut was 2.3 million ³ and fill was 1.2 million ³."

Quite a difficult site, the new motorway was to run straight through a reservoir, which necessitated the removal of an existing stone faced earth dam and the design and build of a new one entirely out of reclaimed material. A total of 1.3 million m ³ of material was moved in this stage alone. The part of the reservoir that was to be lost was removed and became a borrow pit for the remainder of the site. LSS was used to model the new dam and to calculate the amount of material required in its construction. Of the 800,000m ³ of reclaimed material from the old dam, 500,000m ³ was used to rebuild it beside the new road.

"The contract involved weekly excavation measures and the design and monitoring of a large borrow pit big enough to hold almost 800,000m ³ of material. Weekly surveys were jointly undertaken by the contractors and the RE, but everyone else had trouble keeping up with our weekly calculations until, that is, they started to use LSS."

"As material was excavated it was classified according to its grade and suitability for re-use (each sample having a unique 3D reference). The surface coding capabilities of LSS allowed us to keep track of these different materials and to produce a single volume report at the end of each week that told us how each material had changed in size. Even though this wasn't a design and build contract, the fact that both parties had LSS enabled us to agree monthly figures with the Quantity Surveyors, so when at the end of the contract we did a final measure, there was no argument over the final quantities."

LSS was used, primarily in four tasks.

1 Volume and design checks at the tendering stage
2 Earthworks outline design
3 Weekly cut and fill volumes to assist in programme planning and valuation
4 Motorway structures modelled and setting-out information produced.

David has worked on other major contracts including a runway and taxiway reconstruction at RAF Fairford. This was a £50 million Design & Build job in joint venture with SIAC, from designs by Burks Green. It involved breaking out approximately 215,000 m³ of existing blacktop and concrete and replacing it with almost 290,000m³ of mostly Pavement Quality Concrete. LSS was used for recording daily 'as-built' levels and monitoring breakout quantities

"We were provided with just the design outline and strings where the slope grades change. What we did was drape the 2D bay-layout design outline onto the 3D string model within LSS in order to provide the necessary information for the 3 paving machines employed on the site. While much of the job has been built to the original design levels, there are two zones where we had some flexibility, depending on the amount of material we had available to us following the recycling of breakout material. Having LSS on-site allowed us to raise or lower surfaces very easily to increase of decrease the amount of fill required. By zoning the site in this way we were able to produce one volume report which included all elements of the site."

David's other major project was the 43km long Birmingham Northern Relief Road where he used the techniques learned on previous jobs to great effect on this challenging earthworks balancing exercise.