Posted on February 24, 2025
Customer Profile: Headquartered in Brownsville, Wisconsin, U.S., Michels Corporation is an international energy and infrastructure construction contractor with offices in North America, Australia and Germany. The firm’s marine division services include marine construction, shoreline restoration and trenchless crossings.
Business Challenge: Improve equipment reliability and operator productivity on underwater activities such as dredging.
Solutions:
- Trimble Marine Construction System
- Trimble SketchUp
- MPS865
- RTK Base station
- Trimble CenterPoint RTX
- Applanix PPK
Benefits:
- Improved underwater visibility
- Reliable operations even in harsh conditions
- Increased efficiency in machine production
Brownsville, Wisconsin-based Michels Corporation (Michels), a global power, pipeline, energy and infrastructure construction company, continued its tradition of expanding services to support emerging demands by expanding its marine capabilities.
“While Michels has performed marine work for many years, our company leaders saw an opportunity to expand our services to best serve our current and future customers,” said James Dunkley, senior manager, hydrographic surveys at Michels. “We were given the opportunity to put solutions into place that would best suit our needs and the needs of our customers.”
At the time, Michels owned a full suite of excavators, cutter suction dredges, custom-built hydrographic survey vessels, amphibious excavators and diving support vessels, some of which needed support from marine construction software. With the company’s focus on growing its marine business, Dunkley and team looked for technology solutions that would allow for increased efficiency, precise positioning and technology partners willing to combine forces.
“From a technology-enabled software perspective, our team wanted a solution that would save time, energy and money while allowing us to achieve the productivity we desired,” said Dunkley. “One of the things people in our industry may not realize until they’ve already invested in technology is the time and cost required to install sensors and integrate systems. Too many times, we must sort these things out on our own.”
Dunkley knew industry experts at Fabick Cat®, the Caterpillar dealer for Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as well as portions of Missouri and Illinois, and SITECH® Mid-America Marine Positioning, a Trimble marine dealer, from previous work at other companies.
He continued, “As technology specialists, these two organizations have the skill and experience to take care of all of the installation and service for us so we can spend our time doing our work in the field.”
One of Michels’ first investments was the Trimble® Marine Construction System (TMC). As a purpose-built marine focused platform, TMC offers a broad base of functionality to provide a robust construction guidance solution.
Soon after testing its capabilities, Michels had an opportunity to put the TMC-enabled equipment to work in a particularly challenging environment.
A 3D Underwater Edge
Michels won a large project for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District called the Missouri River Bedrock Removal Project. The goal of the project was to excavate a minimum of 120,000 cubic yards of material and restore adequate channel parameters to provide safe navigation of river boat traffic on the Missouri River. The area of concern spanned a little over two miles.
“We were basically breaking rock underwater and then removing it,” said Dunkley. “These are pretty inhospitable conditions — and many machine and sensor systems would not work in these harsh conditions.”
A 95-ton Cat 395 excavator was mounted on a barge, tugged into the area of work, and equipped with sensors to measure everything from pitch and roll to movement of attachments. A monitor connected to TMC was used to display survey and design information and provide a visual of the equipment as it moved underwater. Data on the monitor included hydrographic surveys of the river bottom and the dredge prism defining the channel that needed to be cleared all in 3D, plan and profile views.
The positioning data from TMC became particularly crucial for navigating and guiding the excavation work safely, accurately and efficiently according to the project specifications and survey. Even when working underwater, the TMC-enabled system continued to provide an accurate real-time depiction of the bucket or other attachment location, the position of the boom and stick, and their relationship to both the hydrographic survey data and the design layers defining the dredge prism/channel that needed clearing.
A Foundation for All Future Work
Past experience on a project like this would have required technicians and/or software specialists working on the machine every day, according to Dunkley.
“The TMC system performed continuously throughout the entire project duration without any downtime caused by issues with the electronics, components or software,” he said. “That equates to improved efficiency in the field and successful project execution. When we have an experienced crew, significant amounts of specialized equipment and a system that performs well combined with experts like Noah Frank from Mid-America as our North Star to back it up, we set ourselves up in a position to meet our customers’ goals and succeed as a team.”
Since that early project, TMC has become an integral piece of most of Michels’ marine-focused fleet, helping the firm provide quality services to an expanding list of customers on projects of ever-increasing scope, scale and complexity. Its technology enabled solutions have been deployed on multiple projects, including those that require mobilization of amphibious excavation equipment.
One of the most recent projects was for the Township of Wells Harbor, Maine. In this case, Michels was tasked to dredge 7,400 cubic yards of sediment and reconstruct 2,400 linear feet of beachfront. For this effort, the team used the dredge ‘Cadiz,’ a 12” Ellicott cutter-suction dredge equipped with TMC, which enabled operators to dredge to specification, provide higher operator visibility with no rework and improve productivity.
“Having operator guidance underwater that is reliable and easy to use has increased opportunities for this growing segment of our business,” said Dunkley. “The TMC system as a whole is robust in harsh underwater conditions and the installations are robust and professional and the software is user-friendly and diverse for many applications. The support from Noah Frank and Brad Ebelt has been very helpful. Combining all of this with our professional crews, operators and technicians results in safe, efficient and successful projects.”
When asked for advice to others about technology investment, he concluded, “Technical support on marine projects, especially when striving to ‘see’ underwater is essential. For us, technology and the people behind the scenes that make these systems work have enhanced our ability to grow our business as quickly as we have.”
