The construction industry uses drones more heavily than almost any other, second only to the energy sector. The practical effect of all this attention is that drones have become one of the most valuable tools on any worksite, from civil construction to mines, quarries, and landfills.
Pair drones with powerful processing and analytics software like Propeller—easy enough for anyone on the team to use, accurate enough for experts—and the work of estimating, planning, and tracking projects is simplified at any scale.
To that end, let’s explore the top nine most impactful ways drone survey software and construction progress tracking software can help make your next project a success.
1. Estimate and bid with confidence
Inaccurately estimating the required volume of material movement can mean the difference between winning and losing a bid. It can also mean the difference between a job that earns you money and a job that costs you.
Whether you overestimate or underestimate, mistakes can be expensive. Studies have shown that the cost of rework can reach up to 20% of a project’s total cost, decimating margins.
Propeller gives you powerful, built-in analytics tools that help you track progress to final design, replacing blind spots that could lead to costly errors with clarity and accuracy. Get instant cut/fill volumes, check elevations, and create a visual ledger of your project from the beginning with interactive 3D maps.
With lidar data processing, you can even fly vegetated sites before they’re cleared, verifying client data before you finalize your bid. Fly a site to generate pre-bid topos, then use Propeller’s cut/fill calculations to determine the amount of material you’ll need to move to reach the final grade.
2. Track progress and production volumes
Accurate progress data and reporting are crucial to success, ensuring projects meet quality standards while staying on schedule and on budget. But capturing accurate data can be tricky, limited by site access, surveying resources, safety restrictions, or terrain changes between surveys.
Propeller’s Polygon measurement tool has you covered with a dynamic cut/fill map. Mark out the area you want to measure with just a few clicks, then press a button to generate a heat map displaying cut/fill volumes based on your current site conditions.
One-click reporting lets you directly compare any survey to a past survey for a quick snapshot of project progress, or compare to design to see how much work is left to go. Cross-sections and 3D overlays give you a quick visual reference point with all the data you need—no spreadsheets required.
On an Idaho work site, Grade Tech captured takeoff reporting with a drone and used Propeller’s 3D interactive map to discover that a neighboring property could take all their excess cut material as fill. Without the drone, they would have moved ⅔ of the material miles away before discovering that it didn’t have to travel that far, saving them $90k on a single project.
3. Avoid and resolve disputes
Before drones, proving how much dirt had been moved (and who moved it) was a slow and painful process, especially on large worksites. Without a detailed log of changes in stockpile volume, moving someone else’s dirt is an all-too-common occurrence—and so are the disputes that arise.
In their 2024 Construction Disputes Report, Arcadis found that the average value of construction disputes in North America reached $42.8 million in 2023, up from $30.1 million in 2021. That number pales in comparison to the largest single reported claim, which weighed in at a whopping $2 billion. Disputes are also taking longer to resolve than they used to, with an average length of 14.4 months.
All of which puts the cost of a drone program into perspective, especially considering how often you can fly to keep tabs on site progress. Conducting frequent drone surveys gives you a detailed visual record of who moved material, where, and when. Propeller’s Timeline tool lets you slide between survey dates from one flyover to the next or see a progression of changes in a cross-section view.
Maintaining a digital “paper trail” with easy-to-understand visuals lets you settle disputes as they arise and avoid legal complications or fines from the start, and accurate stockpile volumetrics allow you to pin down tonnage measurements and get a number you can trust.
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5. Strengthen field-office alignment
On a civil construction site, mine, quarry, or landfill, it’s not always easy to communicate the location of an issue—particularly when office workers might only lay eyes on the site a few times a year.
Media makes your team’s communication easier, allowing users to snap a photo in the field that gets instantly geotagged and added to your 3D sitemap. Now, if someone spots an issue—say, a berm that needs repair or a washed-out spot on-site—the simple act of capturing a photo communicates other essential data to the rest of the team, like when and where it was captured. Users can also add supplemental notes to explain why a photo was taken and what work (if any) needs to happen as a result.
Media, site measurements, designs, and real-time location data are all available in the field, reducing the need to call the office for clarity. With browser-based, interactive 3D maps the whole team can access and understand, field and office workers stay on the same page to keep projects on track.
6. Boost on-site safety
In the US, the construction industry ranks second for the most workplace deaths, making safety a huge priority in construction and earthwork. From day-to-day safety plans to traffic management, it’s a focus area that requires significant time and resources to get right.
Most deaths on worksites are due to falls, slips, and trips—all of which can happen while walking stockpiles with traditional surveying equipment. This kind of risk can’t be taken often, and it’s a significant safety hazard to walk stockpiles or navigate worksites with active heavy equipment at all.
Propeller makes worksites safer by keeping surveyors out of harm’s way, even while they survey sites more often. With aerial surveys that rival the accuracy of their traditional counterparts, there’s simply no need to go scrambling over stockpiles or dodging heavy equipment on-site.
Simple point-and-click technology lets you quickly measure haul roads and berm heights to ensure they meet safety standards and flag trouble spots for prompt repair, reducing the risk of injury.
Orica has moved from yearly surveys to monthly surveys using Propeller, giving them the progress data they need to audit their site regularly and catch mistakes before they snowball. Better still, switching to drones has kept Orica’s operators off the active quarry floor, safely out of the way of heavy equipment and minimizing risk while avoiding millions of dollars in losses.
7. Streamline data analysis
Gone are the days when answering quick questions about as-builts versus design required yet another site visit. With Propeller’s drone survey workflows, you don’t even need to leave the office to check the current state of your worksite, troubleshoot issues, or make measurements based on the latest survey.
By measuring grades and cross-slopes directly in your web browser, you can “visit” your worksite without leaving the office. Frequent data capture lets you monitor your site and complete inspections remotely, identifying and fixing problems before they become expensive or require rework.
Propeller makes long-distance work possible for Svevia, whose engineers can create planning files for sites they’ve never been to. Comparing data from each quarry manager with the data in Propeller acts like a control, clearing question marks quickly and easily and making data-sharing between 70+ quarry managers and HQ-based engineers a breeze.
8. Centralize data and documentation
According to a McKinsey report, the average employee spends nearly two hours a day searching for and gathering information. Taking action on that data isn’t what’s occupying almost 10 hours each week—it’s the simple act of finding data that costs us a quarter of our time at work.
But with all your designs, media, survey, and machine data in one place, you can significantly cut back on this wasted time, saving your time and energy for the job at hand. Propeller is that single source of truth for your projects—a one-stop shop where anyone with the right permissions can log in to measure and manage the site they’re working on, right from the 3D map.
With Propeller, your team collaborates from a single map where they can measure and manage progress from any device, sharing surveys, designs, media, and machine data fluidly between teams and stakeholders.
9. Win with accuracy
On fast-paced worksites, even small mistakes can have big consequences. A missed detail today can mean safety risks, environmental violations, or significant rework tomorrow.
Most small mistakes start with misinformation, like bad or outdated quantities stored across disparate systems that don’t communicate. Or survey data that’s far outside the acceptable margin of error for your worksite, rendering the dataset useless.
To us, accuracy means getting the right data to the right people when they need it most, so they can execute great work the first time. Propeller helps you capture and process accurate data quickly using automated, high-precision hardware while storing your files in a single centralized location.
Keeping your site on record creates ultimate transparency and trust, ensuring everyone can access the information they need to make the right calls with confidence.
