Forsight helps PCL by utilizing multi-point time-lapse support

Overview

PCL is a large General Contractor operating in North America, completing projects of all kinds, including large complex projects for which PCL is well known. These include notable projects like LAX Airport, UND School of Medicine, the Suncor Well Pad Program, and many more. 

In this case, the 16th Street Mall Project in downtown Denver will rehabilitate a deteriorating well-known outdoor pedestrian and transit mall and revitalize the city's culture along this famous street. PCL has a contractual requirement to provide live stream and timelapse coverage for the duration of the work, including streaming on the city's website so the public can watch as the project comes to life.

Forsight, being cloud-based and camera agnostic, introduced its features, including unlimited timelapse videos and area-specific analytics, to help PCL understand how to best meet these contractual obligations and improve productivity.

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The Challenge

The project stretched across 12 city blocks, with minimal availability for camera placement. PCL was looking for a company to provide complete product implementation throughout the project's life, meeting all contractual requirements.

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The Solution

Forsight can provide enterprise visibility, including custom retention periods and the ability to scale quickly and easily. Forsight implemented multi-point streaming and timelapse support. This allowed PCL to live stream and generate timelapse videos for 16 unique locations with only four pan-tilt-zoom cameras. They configured each camera to point at four different areas, streaming one at a time for a short duration before rotating to the next view. 

Eric Berglund, Project Engineer for PCL, stated, "implementation and planning, as well as training and maintenance, went very smoothly." This tool is extremely useful for a quick check-in when there is no time to get down to the site. This has also been great for looking back to see exactly what activities were occurring on specific dates. It also gives a bird's eye view of the work, which has helped develop new concepts for particular installations that led to higher efficiencies."

This solution saved PCL the additional cost of 12 extra cameras that would have been needed to achieve the same number of views and time savings from eliminating the need for many site visits. Berglund added, "the solution will have more than paid for itself with those savings by the end of the job."

Additionally, more than 50 employees are now utilizing the Forsight dashboard for remote management, much more than the initial 3-5 anticipated users when PCL originally deployed the system. Users include the project team, design team, and senior management in the district office. The ability to add unlimited stakeholders, each with a customizable permission schema, has allowed PCL to streamline communication and decrease physical time spent on site significantly. 

Overall the solution has yielded a clear ROI and many positive aftereffects for PCL.

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The Results

$30,000 in savings for hardware costs 

50% savings in time by avoiding unnecessary site visits, expected to save hundreds of hours and 5-digits over the project's life. 

$50,000 in savings by avoiding additional third-party timelapse and streaming services

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Future Initiatives 

The 16th Street Mall reconstruction is a three-year project, and Forsight and PCL will continue collaborating on innovative and cost-saving solutions.

The next initiative Forsight and PCL are working on is leveraging the multi-point PTZ cameras for security purposes. Using our deep learning AI algorithms on top of the motorized scanning functionality of the PTZ cameras, we can make a virtual and all-area-encompassing system with just the four cameras. Forsight is helping PCL track the number and type of vehicles on the project to better track the type of work taking place as well as productivity. 

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