Des Moines Business Record

Des Moines Business Record 04-23-06

McAninch pushes earthmoving into the future

By Jason Hancock [email protected]

A fleet of McAninch Corp. earthmoving machines is working a 150-acre industrial development site on the outskirts of Des Moines, but something is missing.

There should be thousands of grade stakes, which are set at points having the same ground and grade elevation and must be placed before a project can begin, but they are nowhere in sight.

This was the scene in July 2000, when Dwayne McAninch, chairman and CEO of McAninch Corp., unveiled how global positioning system technology can revolutionize the earthmoving business.

What emerged was “stakeless” construction, where heavy equipment operators take cues from a computer screen rather than wooden stakes, and McAninch was at the forefront.

“He has definitely been the champion to move the industry forward,” said Chris Mazur, a GPS specialist with Zeigler Inc., a regional equipment dealer. “Because of his efforts, GPS is becoming more the norm than the exception in this business.”

The global positioning system works by having several satellites transmit signals to a receiver, which processes those signals to determine its location. Developed for the military, GPS is now widely used in civilian applications. Installed in earthmoving machines, McAninch said, GPS allows operators to grade soil to accuracies of less than one inch, reducing rework and improving efficiency by up to 30 percent.

Based in West Des Moines, McAninch was the first contractor in the United States to adopt GPS machine guidance. When Caterpillar Inc., the giant equipment maker, formed a joint venture with Trimble Navigation Ltd., a major supplier of GPS instruments, Dwayne McAninch was asked to serve as director, and many of the newest GPS applications were tested on his projects. He helped the companies focus on what the customer really needed, and through tests on his own job sites, helped retool designs.

“We’re ahead of almost everyone in this technology,” McAninch said. “We can run projects all over the country from right here. In the end, we can do it faster and more accurately than anybody else.”

This, in part, led Engineering News-Record, a leading construction industry trade publication, to grant McAninch its Award of Excellence.

“I’m not egotistical,” he said. “But that is as big an award as you can get in the construction business. It was a great honor.”

McAninch was chosen from a list of 25 top “newsmakers” profiled in the magazine in 2005. The award was presented before more than a thousand engineering and construction executives at an April 6 banquet in a New York hotel ballroom.

“In talking with the editors of ENR, it became apparent that what set Dwayne apart was his vision to champion a technology that will permanently change the construction industry,” said Charles Jahren, professor-in-charge of Iowa State University’s construction engineering program. “GPS technology could send grade stakes to the history books the same way personal computers and word processing did for the typewriter. His willingness to take a risk on this technology and his acumen in assembling the right development team is making this happen.”

While many companies shunned the new technology because it was expensive and prone to hardware and software glitches, McAninch embraced it. As engineers were refining GPS in laboratories, his company was trying to perfect them in the field. When Caterpillar comes up with an innovation or an improved component, engineers often drop by McAninch job sites to see how the product is working out. McAninch often drops in on Caterpillar, too, to get the first look at a prototype.

He spent millions retrofitting his machines with the controls.

“They saw the value of it right away,” Mazur said. “In the next few years, just about every contractor out there will have to be running GPS. His company is very progressive.”

Mazur said that earlier this year the Iowa Department of Transportation for the first time had a project on which it required the contractor to have GPS capabilities.

“It saves money and it saves time,” McAninch said. “Jobs are done in half the time, and they are safer, which is very important to me. I can’t make the system, but I know how to use them and which machines to use them on.”

McAninch said GPS technology enables his company to start the job sooner and finish much faster than ever before, which is important when working in the Midwest, where weather dictates how many days a year you can work.

Though some would keep such innovation to themselves, McAninch has sought out his peers, even his competitors, and shared the technology with them, working tirelessly to educate the industry on the benefits of GPS and how it can propel them into the future. He even produced a video containing real field data to help spread the word.

“We had to get this technology accepted by everyone in the industry,” McAninch said. “Otherwise, we’d have this good idea that nobody was interested in. We shared all we learned with universities and even competitors. This is the biggest advancement in earthmoving I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

And McAninch, 69, has seen a lot.

He was raised on a farm in Norwalk, and started with a used bulldozer he bought from his father in 1954. In 1967 he founded McAninch Corp. and has since built it into a $200 million business and one of Iowa’s largest earthmoving and underground utility contractors. The company now has about 450 pieces of equipment and, during peak season, nearly 700 workers.

His son, Doug, following in his father’s footsteps, became president and chief operating officer of the company in 2003.

“He’s very good at what he does,” McAninch said of his son.

McAninch is also looking to the future. He donated $165,000 to Iowa State University last year to develop a mobile research laboratory to study soil characteristics. McAninch hopes this can help to one day validate “intelligent compacting,” which he said would add 20 to 25 years of life to asphalt projects.

“Old roads will last longer,” McAninch said. “It is from a lack of (soil) compaction that asphalt fails. Can you imagine the government money that could free up if you could extend the life of a road that much?”

McAninch said another benefit from the ISU research is the ability to determine soil types in the field rather than waiting for lab results to come back from an off- site lab.

“Eventually, everyone is going to have to have the mobile lab on the job site,” he said.

His help is invaluable, said Russell Walters, assistant professor of construction engineering at ISU.

“This spring we taught two courses on automatic machine control for earth moving,” Walters said. “These classes were our attempt at providing a service to our students and the industry by offering training on a state-of-the-art method that is revolutionizing earth moving. In today’s environment of tight budgets, such classes cannot be offered without champion from industry. For us, that champion was Dwayne McAninch.”

As the company moves toward the future, Mazur said any praise heaped onto McAninch is well earned.