We all know field crews are responsible for generating field sketches. They communicate their findings to you, the client. You need that drawing in a timely fashion as sometimes it will hold up your job if you don’t have it. Your ground disturbance procedure demands you review your locate drawings prior to starting work, and heck you can’t compare first and second sweep drawings until you have them in hand! More importantly you need it correct. Not only in scale, but content. This is where the line between field generated and “Office” or “Off-site” gets blurred. I’m going to expose the magician a little bit here and tell you that most times the field drawing you receive, no matter by email or printed copy, wasn’t generated at a field level. What if I told you there’s a 90% chance the drawing you last received from your locate contractor of choice, was not 100% generated on site. Let’s look at how paperwork flows.
Most of the time paperwork flows from the field, to the office for management approval, QC and so on prior to going to you, the client. It is also quite popular for field crews (as well as survey) to submit field drawings or “field notes” to the office first. From there someone in the office responsible for those field drawings re-draws the information, polishes it and sends it to the client directly or to the field crew who sends it to the client the next day or prints it on site after a little bit of a delay. 2 hours for drawing a lease, really? Sound familiar? How about “I’ll get it to you tomorrow” or my personal favorite “once I get the drawing completed”. You mean to tell me you left site without completing a drawing of something you located on site? You left the job without completing your job? Ok, I digress. Needless to say, you’re probably getting middled. So now let’s look at the cons to this. Sure you get a “polished drawing”, but is it correct? Who knows the site better than the guy who did the locate in the first place? Can you trust second hand information? Can you trust information for a site, generated off site? Also… who pays for that admin person?
At 3-D we guarantee every drawing on every job site big or small, is 100% generated on site and is not touched up or re-drawn by anyone. By us ensuring every drawing is not only correct, but in your email or in your hand on site, when you need it this ensures your job keeps moving. It also takes the interpretation of a field drawing by an off-site admin staffer out of the equasion. Never mind the reduction in administrative costs that often get transferred to you the client and is hidden somewhere in your daily field ticket. Thus, reducing your cost per meter and keeps your budget intact.
3-D Line Locating Ltd is a privately owned Buried Pipeline and Utility Locating company. For over 20 years, we have been at the forefront of the Damage Prevention industry in Western Canada. Although the industry has changed significantly over the last 20 years, we have been very fortunate to have been at the leading edge of the evolution and still maintain the highest levels of quality, accuracy, consistency and customer satisfaction in our industry.
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