O’Steen Brothers is one of the leading residential and commercial site work contractors in Gainesville, Florida, providing high-quality site development and underground utilities services. Started by two brothers in 1972 with a backhoe and a dump truck, they quickly grew to clearing lots and putting fill dirt in foundations. Today, O’Steen Brothers has grown to more than 115 employees and is still a family-owned business driven by client satisfaction and employee dedication.
Whether working on roads, apartment communities, hospitals, or any of the vast array of complex residential and commercial projects, O’Steen Brothers provide complete, start-to-finish work and are highly skilled in land and site clearing, demolition, underground utilities, curbing, sidewalks, and paving, which require planning and building with the utmost precision and reliability.
Beard Equipment provides technology solutions to make its customers’ projects more productive and profitable. Dedicated to supplying customers with the most advanced machine control systems on the market, Beard backs its products with industry-leading service and support.
The companies began working together in 1983 and it’s grown into an extended family relationship for both. To earn their business, Beard came out to demonstrate what Leica Geosystems could do for the O’Steen brothers on the Chiefland Middle High School Project in 2015. “We bought the first machine they brought out to demo, then quickly converted our entire fleet to Leica Geosystems’ Machine Control,” said Dexter O’Steen, co-founder of O’Steen Brothers Construction.
“O’Steen Brothers can now do three major jobs at the same time with all their different set ups,” added Alan Pope, sales rep at Beard Equipment.
The Value of Technology
Today, O’Steen Brothers use a range of Leica Geosystems’ tools and technologies, including machine controls for dozers and graters, data collectors, total stations, base stations, rovers, and tablets. “With the Leica products, GPS was accurate enough that we didn’t have to use laser correction on our grades so we upgraded our whole system to Leica,” added O’Steen.
Production with Leica Machine Control – the elimination of grade checkers and stakes needed for mass grading – has been the biggest benefit for O’Steen Brothers. But the value of using technology extends throughout the entire lifecycle of a construction site.
AGTEK, a software program familiar throughout the industry, is tightly integrated with Leica’s Machine Control and is used by Beard Equipment to build 3D GPS-grade control models for O’Steen Brothers.
”We’ve increased our production with the software and 3D modeling with a lot less manpower, allowing us to bid our jobs tighter and produce a lot more,” added O’Steen. “Leica products speed up everything we do with machine control and increases our ability to take on projects three fold.”
Working with Beard and Leica Geosystems, O’Steen Brothers is able to save 20, 30, sometimes 50 hours per project calculating individual segments, depending on the job size. Another huge time saver? Adjustments can be made on the fly, in the field, a lot quicker now. With Leica’s technology, O’Steen Brothers can accomplish workflows in minutes – accurately – what used to take days. “We’re so dependent upon the [Leica] system that we’d see a 75% reduction in productivity if we stopped using it, it’s that important to us,” said Charles Cheston, General Superintendent, O’Steen Brothers.
Beard Equipment and O’Steen Brothers tight partnership will continue to flourish with Leica Geosystems’ technology.
