Tracking excavation quantities

Hello

I need to track the cubic yards that is excavated everyday from the same area. I don’t want to topo the giant area. Is there a way to just topo what was excavated that day.

I’m no expert, but yes. You Should be able to do a beginning of excavation Topo one time, then an end of day (EOD) Topo for the area excavated that day. Each day will subsequently build off of the previous day, alleviating the need to Topo the entire site. You will however need to collect some data points at the end of each day of excavation, so the end of Day 1 will also be the beginning of Day 2 and so on. Hope this helps.

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Thank you for the reply :blush:I can topo at the end of the day, but jhoe do you organize the topos in TBC and track the quantities?

Depends on if the current days excavation is completely within the excavation of the previous day. If it is, then you can compare the two days topos to get your quantities.

If the daily excavations do not overlap or partially overlap, then you will need to merge the surface of the current topo and with that of the previous days merged topo. In other words you always merge today’s topo with yesterday’s merged topo, and then compare today’s merged topo with yesterday’s merged topo.

I typically organize my topo’s by date in the following naming convention: YYYYMMDD - Description e.g. 20240124 - Excavation Topo would be my name for today’s excavation topo.

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organize the surfaces by date just make sure your using the right topo grid size for the granularity of data that you want and try and hit the same spots everyday @alan.sharp there is a reporting function in RPS for record keeping of quantities and their reports run right? if your using earthwork enabled excavators you could use worksOS for keeping track of daily cut/fills vs designs

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Yes!! That’s what I need. Let me practice this, Thanks :pray:

Peter: I have to do this all the time. To keep it organized both in my controller and in TBC I use a reverse date with a description.
Example: Today would be 240124 EOD AB LOCATION. So, the reverse date makes everything chronological in the controller and in TBC. “EOD” is End Of Day. “AB” is “as-built” but you can use anything that makes sense to you (like cut, fill, excav…). This lets me see instantly that it is what I am tracking day to day. Then for “Location” it’s whatever matches what I am doing. Examples: rough stationing, area description like “SW Corner” basically anything that will help you locate the work when you are just looking at file names. Be consistent once you start so a month from now and 30 surveys later you’ll be able to see just by looking at file names what you did. Make sense?

If the outline of the work area is complicated and you want to make sure you are covering what was done the day before I’ll often open the previous day’s Work Order (or Job if you are using Access) to see the limits of where I finished off. I even put a few paint marks here and there to make sure I get full coverage and don’t cut off a corner or something. A bit of overlap is key to keeping things straight. If the excavated areas are funky shapes I’ll also pick up a boundary around the area before doing the ‘interior’ topo. That way in TBC I can use those boundaries like a patchwork to see where I’ve finished and (heaven forbid!) what I may have missed.

Let me know if you have any more questions.
Have a good evening.

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@Shaun_Carman what do you use as surface1 and surface 2? And what type of merge do you use?

And the surfaces do over lap… Whats the other option?

@Marshall We don’t have earthworks on the equipment :disappointed:

Typical Sequence:

  1. Original Ground Topo of entire site (OG)
    … Earthwork started and ongoing
  2. Topo of Work Area then Merge this topo with OG (For quantities compare this to OG)
    … Earthwork Ongoing
  3. Topo of Area Worked since last Topo then Merge this topo with Merged surface from step 2 (For quantities compare this merged surface with the merged surface from step 2)

Repeat process for every subsequent topo.
I just use the merge surfaces command.
Since the merged surfaces will always be as big as the OG topo then unless the progress topo is outside the OG topo you will always have a big enough surface to compare the progress topo to.

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You can skip a whole lot of work and put Earthworks on the excavator(s) and use WorksOS for progress quantities.