Hi. I am a young land surveyor working in Norway, with polish university background. In my company, which employ almost 2500 people, 12 of them are land surveyor. First part of the company works with designing roads, railways, tunnels. Second with bringing that project into life. We as surveyors are somewhere between. Helping in designing process but also works on the construction site with ex. setting out points and control measurements.
When I started almost one year ago, I was really excited that the company is an owner of Leica Scan Station C10. That gave me a lot of hope for being a part of terrific projects. However, after a while I found out that C10 spends most of the time alone in the basement, not on the site ;( . I thought about it a lot and I am still thinking. What is the reason of that’s situation and how to change it? My ides:
First of all I saw a problem with software. We have a lot of different software. But for most of them just basic license. Reason: if you doesn’t know what you really want to achieve is hard to choose a good tool.
Second workflow. Bed workflow in scanning projects. Reason: lack of experience. I you want to do something good and fast, repeat it a lot of times. Draw conclusions and make your workflow better.
Third, good presentation. We have some presentations…but it is just a lot of sparkle. You need a presentation which is prepared for a particular group of clients (architects, engineers, GIS experts)
And finally TEAM. At the university everything was about discussion. Now in era of robotic stations most of the time I worked alone. But on the other side I have already learned that it is impossible to do everything by my own.
I am getting closer to find some solution for these problems but maybe You can give me some good advices. Do I miss something? How to ‘warm up’ scanning a little bit in my company?
What Leica, Faro, Reigl and the others don’t tell you is that writing the check for the Laser Scanner is the cheap and easy part.
The difficult part of owning a Laser Scanner is making sure that you have the people, systems, processes and software in place to successfully deliver projects to clients.
It sounds as if your company did not perform the due diligence of what it takes to be successful Laser Scanning.
First anyone that wants to be successful Laser Scanning, needs to first understand the “value” and power of today’s software. CADD software is very basic. If your firm has multiple versions/releases you should be suspect that they do not appreciate the value of software or the processes required to successfully deliver a project using the software; Which is a segue to your second bullet.
Understanding changes in workflow demands vision. The vision that tells you that initially the workflow may take longer, but, you need to understand the potential value Laser Scanning can provide.
Your third point relies on the vision to convey to the client “why” they should want you to Laser Scan for them. Laser Scanning provides level of detail, speed, safety and understanding not available by many previous technologies.
In marketing, don’t tell them how to make sausage. Tell them why they want to buy sausage. Because sausage is Mmmmm Mmmmm Good.
We purchased a mobile lidar unit with detachable static scanner on July 1. The learning curve has been AWESOME (both great and overwhelming).
Find a project and get the management excited. Someone posted about scanning the facade of a mall. I just scanned a baseball field for learning (and a project, but who needs to scan the whole field when they just needed the heights of the existing light poles).
Fortunately I have need for 3d presentations, so I can find use for this application of the scanner. And that is not even why I bought the unit...
I have been using Carlson Point Cloud along with some freebies. There's a 30-day free trial if you can dedicate yourself to the cause. Reading Ch 13 of the manual will help but it does lack.
How long does a scan take with the C10?
Thanks for advice:)
Scanning time (360 scan) depends on resolution you choose: low, medium, high or highest. It differ from 5 to 40 minutes. For close object low is ok. In projects I have tried C10 I usually used medium. After that C10 starts taking pictures to get RBG values.
My advice is to find the market you will be serving and run some test projects. Without a defined market, you have no clients and thus no profits. This is the problem I see with scanning too often, I know several firms who have scanners sitting around doing nothing because they don't have any idea how to market it. Just having more data isn't necessarily better, being able to sell that data is the key. Find projects with clients that can benefit from the extra data and show them how they can save/make money. Once the clients start requesting the info, your company will figure out how to supply it.
"...Find projects with clients that can benefit from the extra data and show them how they can save/make money. Once the clients start requesting the info, your company will figure out how to supply it...":good:
Great Advice. The client needs to know what is in it for them.
