Elevation to Engineer Ready: ArcSite for Foundation Repair

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Nicole Kelly and I'll be moderating today's session. Today's session is called Elevation to Engineer. Ready. It's inside ArcSite's Foundation Repair Workflow. All right. So what are we covering today. So first we're going to walk through the playbook of a foundation repair job from start to finish. We'll open it up for your questions and then we'll close out with next steps. Some quick housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded. And if you have any questions you can drop them into the Q&A panel on the right hand side of the screen as we go. We'll get to as many as we can. Time allowing. All right. So running today's webinar is going to be Patrick Gorman. He is our director of Customer Success. PG spends his time working directly with foundation repair teams who use ArcSite. So what you're about to see actually is built on best practices developed by foundation repair pros like yourselves. So PG welcome. Thanks for doing this. We're really excited to have you on board. My pleasure. So here's the framework for today's lesson. Lesson session. It's the best practice playbook for jobs that actually test a crew. So things like irregular foundations, multiple peer types, and documentation

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[01:30]

that an engineer can sign off on. So what does that workflow look like. So we're going to track a job through the six stages capture, elevation design collaborate close and document. So let's start where every job starts. at the arrive and capture site. So what happens when a rep pulls up to a house where the foundation isn't a clean rectangle with ArcSite AR Site Capture, a rep can walk the perimeter with the device camera to get measurements in minutes, so no tape measure needed, no crawling through tight spaces. What does that look like? Well, we'd like to show you. So walking the perimeter with the camera PG. If you've got anything to add in here. Feel free. Yeah, absolutely. So the AR scanner is is one of our newer tools and is available works both inside and outside. As we saw our director of sales there Alex is walking in outdoor space for our purposes today. We'll treat it as an indoor shape as you'll usually be working to use the AR to outline some kind of foundation or footprint of a property or structure. Okay, great. And so I'm sure people would love to see what does that look like when it's not a video. Absolutely. So I'll I'll jump right in and share my iPad and we'll get things going.

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[03:00]

Starting here at ArcSite, we've got a shape very similar to what Alex was putting together out there in the field. So we've got a few anomalies. It's not quite a rectangle here, but wanted to walk through just a few things I see very regularly with foundation companies to kind of set the stage and identify what the site looks like. So we've got a great start here with the footprint of our foundation, but we can add more details to either give homeowners a better understanding of what they're looking at. A clearer picture is going to usually translate to more understanding and more sales. It's also going to help any additional teams that need context here as well, whether it is an internal team that needs to use this to pull out materials and actually put together inventory for the site, or if you need to send this to a structural engineer or anything else. So I'll walk through a few steps here in setting the stage and kind of identifying the site. So from our footprint I'm going to start out by adding a few shapes. So I'll start over here in my shapes panel. I've grabbed a few of these recently. We've got a whole list of shapes available here, but I've got a few here in my recently used. That way I can very quickly access commonly used shapes. So I'm going to go ahead and start by identifying maybe there's a staircase to get down into this basement or foundation that we want to include. And maybe we have some trees across the back here that may not always be something that you want to share, but in this case, we might be talking about root intrusion. If this is a waterproofing

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[04:30]

job, might be causing structural issues across this back wall. And so the drawings I see will range from very basic, where we're just getting to the bare bones of what products are going into the system. I've also seen very highly designed the projects that go into great detail around the environment, what's going on with the structure. So the more detail you can provide, clearly and cleanly, the better. So I've got a few shapes set up here. I also want to add an opening just so the homeowner understands kind of where the front door is and can help center themselves here on the project. And then finally, I'm going to add some dimensions here so that we have a good, clear understanding of what kind of measurements we're looking at from that AR scan. So I'm going to quickly highlight my drawing here. And I'm going to pull out the actual dimensions. And add. And now I've got a very clear understanding of exactly what I'm looking at now that I've got the stage set here with some of the basics, I'm ready to start adding some more technical information and more deep data. Things like topographical. Well, that is a great segue for us. So let's talk about now the next piece that mapping the elevation. So we've heard from foundation pros that a common source of costly errors was the manual editing of this data. We know it's a really important part of the workflow. So a little plug here. Our talented development

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[06:00]

team built the topographic feature with the foundation repair pros in mind. So PG you know, thinking about that and all of like the benefits of this new feature, which I think would be new for pretty much everybody on this call. Let's talk about like, what does that look like in, in like the situation of somebody using the topographic feature now. Sure. So happy to share again and walk through that process. So when we dive in again, now that I have my my environment set, I can very easily add topographic information. Now, the one thing I'll caution you on here is, is I do want to use a couple layers to introduce this because the contour is going to be valuable information. But we do want to be able to see what's going on in the inside of this foundation, beyond just the elevation. So I'm going to add a layer here to give us a space to work that will allow us to toggle back and forth between topographical information as well as critical site information. So I'll go here into layer two. And from here I'm going to go down to my right and add site data. And there's a couple of different things we can add here. First I'm going to start with some basic elevation data points. So anywhere that I tap it's going to allow me to add a positive negative or neutral value here. So across this back if we're setting up a project where we feel the back is sinking or that's what our measurements

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[07:30]

are telling us, then I can very easily come in here and add these measurements wherever I tap. So maybe this is -1.8. Maybe we've got minus one over here in the back corner. The center might even out a little bit here towards the front. Maybe we have some positive deviation. So already you can start to get a picture of what's going on here. But you're interpreting a lot, which is why we built another tool that allows you to add contour lines and data to make this really come to life. So when I tap, as long as I've got a closed space, our foundation here is closed. So we've gone and filled this in. This is telling a very clear story about where the positive and negative are. I can also come in, and I can adjust this so I can change from a red to green. I could do a black to grayscale, red to blue. We can also change the weighting of some of the lines as well as the design here. So whatever you're most comfortable reading, we have a number of different options to allow you to go in and customize this for your needs. We can even change the interval if you're trying to get more or less precise. You can see how that affects things in the background here. Now, once I've got this added, I do want to hit finish. But as I said before, this is kind of dominating my picture now. So we put this on its own layer for a reason. I can go back to layer one and I can toggle on or off visibility here. So I can continue to

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[09:00]

add products to this space without having to work around all these colors and lines and measurements. So at this point, we've added ArcSite data. We've got a good idea of the topographic situation and what's going on under the property. So from here we can start to plan and design the repair well. And that leads us to the next piece of our workflow which is designing the repair. So nice segue there. So you know, thinking about it like what does a job like maybe look like if there's more than one peer type on the same job? And so that's where product libraries come into play. And also the array based spacing enables you to place multiple peers and anchor types without having to measure or count by hand. And then finally, with ArcSite, the automatic advanced calculations would save you time and reduce that potential for some costly errors. So thinking about all of these particular pieces that are helpful when we're designing a job, like give us a little bit of insight into what does that look like in ArcSite? Absolutely. So we'll go back to the canvas here and dive into adding some products for ArcSite here. Now that we've got a decent idea of what's going on. So again, I've been able to toggle off this other layer so I don't have to work around all the colors and measurements. But let's say for this repair, the recommendation is a few pilings all across the back and down this this side.

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[10:30]

Here I can very quickly go into my products panel, and I'm going to grab a hybrid piling exterior for this project. I can very quickly move this into place. I'm going to zoom to give myself a little bit more precision, and I'm going to use the duplicate tool to quickly add several to this line. Now all I have to do is tap and drag. It's going to give me a measurement here to let me know I'm exactly six feet away from my original. And one more. And now I know we don't keep them on the corner, so I'm just using this as a reference point. So this is a good way to very quickly add several products, several of the same product. However, this is great for maybe 1 to 5 pilings. I don't want to do this if I've got a job that takes 20, 50, 100. So we've got this great tool, the array tool that allows you to build a grid or an array. So in this case I want several pilings across the back of this wall. But I don't want to use the copy and drag method and get an exact measurement eight, nine, ten times. It's a little bit time consuming. So instead I'm going to position my first piling and I'm going to come down to the edit tool. The array tool is going to allow me to select that piling. And we're going to have a lot going on here at first. But I'll explain what each of these mean. So first I've got my degree. You know, what direction do we want these pilings to start to populate off the base one. So I've got 270 degrees,

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[12:00]

meaning it's going to take a right and populate to the right of my original object. Next you can see I've got a couple measurements here. These are both set to six feet. What this is telling the system is left to right. Or my column distance needs to be six feet apart. I've got the same for my my rows as well. You'll also notice I've got a 1x and a 10x here. 10x is telling me how many columns or how many of these pilings we're going to stick to the right of this one. 1x is telling me that I only need one row. I could very easily update this 1x to 10, and now I've got a massive grid of perfectly spaced pilings that I can manipulate further from here. I, I haven't calculated, I know it would take me a tremendous amount of time to try to do this by hand and get it this perfect. Now for our example, we don't need 100 pilings. We maybe just need 8 or 9, maybe ten on this. So there's a few things we can do, just like you saw. I can adjust this number. So if I tap in I can change this number of columns. So in our case I'll drop this to one. You'll also notice on the bottom I have a few tools associated with this feature. So I can change the count or the spacing. I don't want to change my spacing. We've got our six feet on center so the spacing is good. But our count we may want to change here. So you'll notice I've got a green arrow. I can drag this to the left or right. And every time it clears one of these pilings it will subtract it.

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[13:30]

Conversely, every time I hit that six foot mark it's going to add a piling for me automatically. So very quickly and easily I'm able to get the pilings I need across this back wall. My favorite step to forget is finish. We're not going to do that today though. So now we've got our pilings set. And again, I've been told a few times we don't put pilings on the corner so I can quickly clean those out and keep the pilings I need here. Now that's the array tool, but I do want to add a few other products here just to kind of give us some variety as we go through this example. So I'm going to go back up to my products panel. I'm going to add a beam here. So you've got a linear product that I can run across this back wall on the inside. And maybe because we saw so much variation on the back side here, we do want some internal pilings as well. So I can place these along this line again using that simple six foot distance and the copy tool. So a couple of different ways to do that. Finally I want to add a polylift here. You can make fun of me if this isn't the right solution for this corner. But I do want to showcase the ability for us to take on advanced calculations. So I very quickly and easily drew a box there to identify the square footage that we're going to be doing a polylift. If I go up here to my reports and inputs, you can see exactly how much heavy lifting ArcSite's doing in the background. So first I've got my exterior and interior pilings. We've got warranties available for each of those so we can provide

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[15:00]

different options. If you need to augment any product with something like a warranty. We also have this polylift calculation, which we've built on the back end to ask for height density multipliers, as well as how many walls we're making contact with, which is going to get us our final calculation. I've seen this equation built. I wouldn't want to do it manually. I certainly wouldn't want to do it in the field. So we've built it once in the system, and you've got the ability to go in and see exactly what that's calculated here. Across 454 pounds of our polylift material. So now we've added ArcSite conditions, we've added our topographical information. We've got some products on here as well. We've built our first drawing. But this extends more than just the team in the field and the customer. This is one drawing for both teams. Yeah. And you mentioned that one drawing for both teams. And I think that it's kind of important to remember that for for who was on on site at the customer site, the office still needs to know like what's happening. And so like what happens on the office side. when a rep is still standing in the driveway? Like, right, They need the drawing, they need the site photos, the structural notes. They still need to get all that to the office team. So with ArcSite, these sink to the cloud the moment they're captured. So both the office and the production team, the the team on site, they'll see the same job real time, which means no callbacks for a detail

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[16:30]

that got lost. Right. That's really important. So thinking about that and what that might look like, and you know, with somebody who is using ArcSite, like show me a little bit about what that might look like in ArcSite itself. Absolutely. And it's an important note here as well because we want this available to both teams. But we also recognize there are times where you may be out in the field somewhere with low service or, you know, away from a strong internet connection. One thing I want to point out is everything we've done up to this point can be done offline. So this publish and share to the cloud is the only piece of this process we do need an internet connection for, which means you can get through the vast majority of your workflow without an internet signal. So if you need to connect to a hotspot, you're somewhere remote way out in the field. You only need to do it for this step rather than the entirety of the time that you're working in ArcSite. So a couple pieces here to kind of polish this up. We'll go into field data. You can customize these. I've added just a select few that I see pretty frequently here. So you know, is there a pet on premises that we need to worry about when we come out for our inspection? Are there any notes that we want to add here? I'll keep it simple for today. And maybe you're working in a gated community or an HOA. You know, what's the gate code? How do I actually get in on site here? So now that I have this captured, this is additional information I can share with the Home Office, the install team. I can also make this customer facing,

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[18:00]

if there's certain data you want to share with the customer. To further illustrate your point, the reason that you need to install the products you do and whatnot. Finally, we can add payment information here. It's going to add a deposit very quickly. We can support multiple different payment schedules. And we can run credit card and ACH payments through ArcSite along with offering finance. I'll keep it simple here with cash for our first example and hit Create reports. And as soon as I do this, this is going to give us the ability to run through everything. But before I do, I'm going to save our proposal and publish this. So the team at home has the ability to work with it directly. So now that I have this published. I can actually go into my user site and we can see on the home office we've got our project in here. You can see I've got a couple. We're cheating ahead a little bit, but I can see what I've already built out here in the system. And my team has a lot of data already on what I've captured in the field without me even selling the job yet. So at this point, both teams have access to everything. I've got all my product information, I've got my site data, we've added topographical info. Now we're ready to kind of get things wrapped up to close the job. Yeah. And, you know, thinking about the next step and what is what does that look like. Right. Closing the job really has like three key steps for an effective close right. There's presenting

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[19:30]

the good better best pricing which is recommended to be able to give the homeowner the scope right. That works best for their needs. One of the other key features for an effective close is offering that onsite financing right then and there. Right. Like these jobs are not usually something a homeowner has been saving up for. So offering financing options really helps provide a tangible way you think about making monthly payments for a big expense like that, and then finally capturing the signature and taking the deposit. That's that's what you do when you close. Right? But offering these right away while you're standing in the driveway, instead of waiting for the office staff to be able to handle it, helps reduce that friction for the homeowner. So, you know, thinking about like the ideal close like, what do you think that that looks like in ArcSite? And how does that help really effectively help that team that's standing in the driveway close. Absolutely. So I know every team is going to be a little bit different. But Nicole's absolutely right. And I do have clients today that are boasting a 50% close rate with this exact model. They're building it out on site, they're putting together a proposal, and in a lot of cases are developing a good, better best, just as Nicole stated. So we've got one option that we've built here live. But I do have a few others that I've prebuilt that we can add to this as options. So for each option, I can add a name for it. So I can call this best.

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[21:00]

I can add a description. And I can add this to my proposal. You can add as many as you'd like. At a certain point, it probably doesn't make sense to throw 50 options at someone, but 2 or 3 to give them a good sense of of what you can actually put together does give them the ability to choose. And we do see close rate improve when we're looking at which option rather than a yes no. So now that I have a few options on the canvas, I can go through, scroll and see exactly what my presentation is going to look like for each of these options the final price, the terms and conditions, the signature as well, and our drawing. So I can send this to the client as is. I also can toggle through each of these just to make sure I feel good about the products, the final pricing, the language, and if you've discussed multiple options with a client, maybe you want to recommend one. Give them a little push towards the one that you'd like to work on, or what you'd recommend as a professional. At this point, I can go in and I can send this to the client, so I'll go ahead and hit send to client. I can give it either a modern or classic proposal layout. I'll go with our modern here today. And this is language that we can customize. So I can add additional language here on the fly. We can also customize this template on the back end. So you've got something consistent to send every time you've got who you're sending this to.

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[22:30]

If you need to CC an office manager, sales manager, team lead, someone else that wants eyes on this as a proposal goes out to a customer. We can do that here. We also have the ability to generate a link should you need to send a text. So a few different options to connect and get in front of your client. I'm going to stick with email today, and I'm going to send this directly to myself. And there we go. So here is the the title of the proposal that was sent over to me. And so if I click into this, we can see the language that we just saw in that template box. And I can go in and view my proposal here as the client. Now you'll notice this opened a new tab for me. So this is a presentation that I can take a look at here. It gives me my valid until date, who it's prepared for. Now I can explore my options. And now here I can see all of the good, better, best options we just discussed. Do I want to compare options? I've got them side by side. I can select an option to dig in a little bit deeper. So I see this is recommended. Let's take a look. I've got my beautiful drawing. I've got a breakdown of my materials here. I've got some social proof built in. I can go through and review the contract and actually approve this. And this is where our digital signature comes into play. So I can review this in full, or I can jump right to the chase, go in and sign and approve. Now this does capture a time stamp

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[24:00]

as well as an IP address. So the model that I'm seeing work very well for on site closing is you will put together the proposal just as we have. You'll send it to the customer client, let them know. Hey, I just sent that to you. Do you want to grab your device? Come out here. I can talk you through it and walk through this presentation with the client. Talk through any questions that they may have, and when they're ready, they have the ability to jump right in and sign. So here's our date stamp. The reason that I encourage you to get it on their device is it will also capture an IP address. So should there ever be a legal dispute or any need to go to court, you will have the necessary data to go in and actually defend that. This was in fact the client. And this is a legal signature. Once signed, it's available here and I can hit finish as the client. This is a reminder that I'm on the hook for whatever I just signed up for. And now at this point, I have the ability to go view my proposal. I can make a payment right here. So if I want to jump in, it's going to give me a breakdown of exactly what my payment looks like. I can grab an invoice and payment record. I can reach out to sales if I have any questions, I can download this, or I can jump right in and make my credit card or ACH payment. I'm not going to show this part because last webinar I had to get a new credit card. So you can imagine plugging in credit card information from here. But this is where you capture a deposit. So now you've got

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[25:30]

the customer committed and you're ready to start doing the job. So at this point we've taken care of the customer, but we may have other people we need to send data to. So you know, what does this look like to get the correct information out to the engineer? Yeah, And that that leads us to our final piece, which is document for the engineer. Because what if our particular job needs an engineer to actually review it? That's when things like to scale drawings and the DXF export really come into play. So, PG, I'm putting you back on the hook. What does that look like from the ArcSite point of view? Because having an engineer review and approve is probably a pretty important component for a lot of these complex jobs. Absolutely. So now that we've seen kind of the polished workflow that you want to send over to a client, if we need to go in and add more information or send this to another team, maybe I do want to toggle this layer back on, but from here I can go up and export this a number of different ways. As Nicole said, I can get this into my AutoCAD program with a DXF or DWG. I can also pull this out as a PDF. We have a number of different options here. To set our scale, to set our paper size, to set how we want our grid to appear, whether we want the full drawing or just the visible portion. And from here I have the ability to export and send that through

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[27:00]

whatever my my communication app of choices. You can send by email, you can AirDrop, you can copy this as a PDF, whatever you need to do to send this from ArcSite. So that is the workflow here to get this out of ArcSite and in the hands of your engineer install team or whoever. If you don't need to go through a full proposal process with payment products, pricing terms, language, and a signature. Well that's great. Thank you so much for walking us through that. And you know, you've seen the topographic and array based spacing. And now we're building AI into the drawing itself. So your crew has to do even less manual work. So I think it's really important for people to understand like we we are innovating for the foundation repair industry. As you saw, typographic was an area that we really needed to concentrate on to help the foundation repair pros be more streamlined and to be more accurate and to reduce some of that, that costly error. And thinking to, you know, about ArcSite, we we have a support team here that is standing by ready to help you. So if you're onboarding a new rep, for example, our team here is standing by ready to assist you. And if you've got to figure out a tricky job and ArcSite, I know that PG's team would really be delighted to hear from you. So now we get into the fun part. So the Q&A and I'm going to actually have to put on my reading glasses here

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[28:30]

to be able to see who has submitted some questions, but are you ready to dive in and see what people have to say? Yep. Let me have it. All right. So the first one that I am seeing here is, can you tell us a little more about the toga graphic readings? Right now we track elevation readings by hand and do the math ourselves before we even start a drawing. Yeah. So with with topographic drawings, you get the ability to drop those different reference points on the canvas. One thing I didn't show and is part of this question if you need to recalculate something, we do have a way to pick an existing measurement and reset it to the reference point. Now to do that by hand, you've got to go recalculate every single one of those data points. But with ArcSite you have the ability to choose that reference point. Change that to be your reference point and it will adjust all the other measurements you've dropped accordingly. So very quickly and easily you can get everything updated if you're able to make that reference point change. Well okay, let's see what else is next. How do you actually show a homeowner where the foundation's dropping? We usually just point and explain it out loud. That's a great place to start, but if you do want to leave something behind that they're going

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[30:00]

to share with either a spouse or talk through in further before they make a full decision, there are a number of different ways to kind of call that out. These reference points are a good start. Today I showed you the full contour lines, which might be a little overwhelming in some cases for a homeowner, but you could at least show, you know, hey, we're at a minus two in this back corner. This is a significant drop off. There are a few other features you can use here. One would be the call out tool to actually label and say, this is the deepest part of the foundation, or this is the area we need to focus on and address. The final one is the ability to take photos so you can snap pictures either live on your device, or you can pull them directly from your library and attach those to the proposal as well. That way, you've got visible evidence to show parts of a property the homeowner might not go. I've got a crawlspace under my house. I only go in there when I need to change the air conditioner filter down there. Otherwise, I have no idea what the back corner of my foundation looks like. So if someone came out and showed me a picture of it crumbling, I'd believe them because I haven't been down there. Yeah, pictures are are really good proof sometimes. And and one other question does that elevation data actually live on the drawing itself or is it a separate report we'd have to put together? It doesn't it does live in the drawing itself. So I could have exported that full contour rainbow map to the customer

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[31:30]

for today's purposes. I wanted to illustrate the product piece, but if I had left that layer toggled on, you'd have visibility to share with the homeowner what I'd recommend. If you want to show both, I would send the proposal the way I did with it toggled off, and the same way I exported it to send to an engineer or other team. You could send that to the homeowner as well, as kind of a follow-up. Here's our formal proposal of what we'd like to fix within the property, and here's some detailed topographical data to show you exactly what we're trying to fix for you. Very cool. And, PG, this is kind of a selfish question that I'd like to ask. What's something most contractors on this call probably don't know that ArcSite can do? Oh. That's a great question, because I just told you all of our secrets at the beginning of this call. I would have had a bunch of answers. I would say it, you know, zooming out of this call itself, I would say this combination of digital signature, payment and finance, we have folks that have dabbled with one or a couple of them, but it is a really, really powerful set of features. The other one I would throw in there is good, better, best. There's some very, very easy ways to put that together. Today I kind of showed you a pre baked model, but if you do want to dig in further with any member of our team, we'd be delighted to show you a full demo of how to very quickly show up a set up, a good, better, best model

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[33:00]

and how to present a proposal like I did today. Yeah. And that I guess you're great leading me into my next slide. You know if you saw anything today that's new to you, even if you've been on ArcSite for years, reach out to your ArcSite team and ask them to show you any of this hands on. Any closing words before we sign off? Just that I appreciate anyone and everyone that's decided to spend better part of an hour listening to us here this afternoon. So we've got a lot of fun stuff in the works. We've launched a lot of fun stuff here recently, so if you haven't taken a look at what ArcSite can do, or you've been kind of stuck in your workflow for a long time, definitely worth exploring some of the new features and talking to any one of these gentlemen here on this slide about how to get involved. Well, great. We're up at time. I really want to thank everyone who joined us today. I appreciate your attendance and the questions that you've asked. And PG definitely appreciates you as well. And ArcSite is ready standing by. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the team that you see here. And we look forward to talking with you guys soon. Thanks. Thanks, everybody.

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