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gINT TRAINING HELPS USERS AT NTH RAPIDLY LEARN NEW TIME-SAVING
GEOTECHNICAL DATA MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

NTH Consultants, Ltd. (NTH), a top engineering and environmental services consulting organization in Detroit, relied on legacy software for years to manage and report their geotechnical data.

Legacy System Falls Short

While working on the prestigious Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC) project (spanning the Detroit River between Michigan and Canada), NTH's software system started malfunctioning and could not produce the required geotechnical documents in a timely manner due to software limitations. NTH decided it was necessary to update their geotechnical software and selected gINT Professional, as it provided the necessary flexibility to produce advanced, highly effective geotechnical reports.

New Software Means New Processes

NTH implemented gINT Professional and immediately began using it on the DRIC project. "We had been planning some changes for the aging software we were using," recalls Zachary Carr, Engineer for NTH Consultants. "However, the project demands just moved everything forward. After experiencing problems with our existing software system and knowing the limitations, we completely reorganized the way logs were generated using the gINT system, had a specialized template built for the bridge project in the short term, and then used the template to develop additional base templates so that all our reports would look more uniform and professional."

Working with NTH, gINT Software designed custom reports and helped NTH develop a customized report structure to ease the transition to gINT.

"Buying a system and creating new forms is just the beginning," Carr explains. "We concentrated use of the new software to our Detroit office and did test runs to see how the software worked and what needed to be tweaked. Once we got it the way we liked it, we scheduled on-site training to bring in users from our other offices throughout the Midwest."

The decision of NTH to focus on data entry training immediately, during the initial deployment phase, showed the learning curve to be minimal, with the company getting up to speed shortly after the training.

On-Site Training Brings Users Up to Speed Quickly

Attendees at the on-site training learned about the different capabilities gINT provides, how to input data, and how to import data from other applications.

Carr recalls, "Two areas needed attention during software implementation. During initial test runs, the report templates were adjusted, which invariably changed the formatting. To address this concern, the templates were protected and locked. This way the company's format standards remained consistent from office to office. Secondly because our users were unfamiliar with the software, I received several calls with very basic support questions. As such, training was imperative."

During the training, users learned about gINT's benefits and quickly recognized that gINT would allow them to perform their tasks quicker and more efficiently, resulting in more effective management of project data.

"The biggest challenge we found was that the gINT solution is very different from our old system. The data entry for the gINT system is user friendly and learning the main components of the system was straightforward. With the automated components, data entry time should be significantly reduced in the future as people become more and more familiar with gINT."

Summary

NTH Consultants has been using gINT for less than a year but already plans to use it for all soil borehole logs as well as well logs and rock cores: a large part of their workload. Now that the initial training phase has been completed, NTH plans to provide online training to those who missed the initial training class. Carr states "The fence diagrams make gINT stand out, and I know that there are more tools, in the software, that will improve our reports as we become more familiar with the software."

 

About NTH

Since its inception in 1968 as a geotechnical engineering venture, NTH Consultants, Ltd. has evolved into a full-service infrastructure and environmental engineering firm, well known and respected for providing innovative solutions for tough engineering challenges in the built and natural environment.

NTH has grown to a firm of more than 270 employees, serving a diverse Midwest and Mid-Atlantic client base from nine offices throughout Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio. For more information, visit www.nthconsultants.com.