Page 264 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

This whole SITECH thing has just exploded our margins. Everywhere. It’s a whole team effort.
– Eric Kuenzi, co-owner & vice president, K & E Excavating
large excavators, articulated trucks, dozers, and blades. All Cat. All equipped with Trimble naviga- tion gear. All taken care of like a newborn.
“When anything new comes out, we want to be at the forefront. I don’t want to look back ten years from now and see that all these guys passed us up and now we’re back here in old-school,” says Ker- ry. “We’re very progressive with machine control. I don’t think people really know what it can do for them, or they would already have it. One day they’re going to wake up and realize they can’t live without it. That’s exactly where we are right now. We seriously can’t live without it.”
All their high-tech equipment has added a new layer of precision to K & E’s production capac- ity. “We had a creek job the summer of 2012 up by Turner [Oregon],” says Eric, vice president and oftentimes job superintendent. “We were digging out a swale [drainage ditch] about six feet deep and fifteen feet across. There was a three-foot-wide ca- nal at the bottom with a tiny fish passage running through the middle of it. Our operator did it all with a Cat 345. When the engineer came back out to see it, he was really surprised. He said it looked like we’d dug it with a spoon.” With accuracies
up to 0.1 of a foot, they can finesse right down to the smallest detail. “It’s rare to see excavators with GPS on them,” says Duane Jr., now president of Peterson’s Earthmoving Division. “That’s pretty forward-thinking. Most people, if they have GPS, will put it on a blade. To put it on a large excavator is really unique.”
In 2006, Kerry and Eric hired a machine control manager to oversee all their GPS gear. Alex Cul- bertson now leads a team of four GPS techs who troubleshoot and maintain all K & E’s navigation systems and manage how they interface with the earthmoving equipment. Culbertson also builds all the computer models they use to run their jobsites. “We can take 80 percent of the survey quote right out of our bids because we do it all in-house now,” says Eric. “This whole SITECH thing has just ex- ploded our margins. Everywhere. It’s a whole team effort.”
K & E’s pioneering instincts don’t stop there. In 2013, the cousins invested in a new technology that builds a scale model out of Styrofoam. They found the large drafting machine in Canada. “They can take an engineer’s drawing and create a 3D mod- el with that machine,” explains Eric Wavra, SI- TECH’s Precision Products sales rep back in 2015, who worked with K & E. “They cut the design into foam before they cut it into the earth so they can see if there are any problems with the engineer’s design before any major money is spent.” In 2015, for instance, K & E’s Bly Mountain job entailed straightening a fifteen-mile section of OR-140 between Klamath Falls and Bly, Oregon. They had to carve big chunks out of the mountainside by drilling and blasting solid rock and then clear it away for commuter traffic. At its height, there were thirty-five Cat machines on the job—primarily dozers, excavators, and articulated trucks—most outfitted with GPS technology. But before a sin- gle tractor was hauled to the site, they created a detailed Styrofoam model of the job. “They take all the information the county engineers give them and feed it into their high-tech machine to see
262 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG