Before a recent concrete pour, Colby Lindsay walked the job site to check anchor bolts. He found that they were all sitting about six inches apart. Catching the mistake before the concrete was poured and the steel arrived saved a fortune.
“He paid for the unit right there,” he says, “and probably could have paid for 10 more.”
Lindsay is a virtual construction manager and BIM coordinator for CORE Construction. Recently, his company began placing centimeter-accurate Emlid field GNSS receivers directly into the hands of project superintendents and engineers. The bet: Let the field crews closest to the job check it out for themselves while there’s still time to fix bugs.
A company built around quality control
CORE Construction is a general contractor managing K-12, healthcare and municipal projects in California, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Indiana, Illinois and Florida. As much of its portfolio involves complex renovations to existing campuses, precision is vital.
Danielle Williams, director of the virtual construction department, is leading the field technology push. Site visits are how your group finds the things worth solving. “That’s what we’re seeing our field teams encounter, that they have more quality control issues with. That’s what drives us to look for new technologies,” Williams says of field teams.
To manage quality, CORE Construction adapts the Army Corps of Engineers’ three-step approach: a pre-job meeting with trade partners, a first-build inspection and ongoing follow-up checks. New GNSS receivers support these initial and follow-up inspections.
Data breached drones could not be shut down
While the team has used drones for years to map the site’s topography using ground control points, aerial images lack fine detail. From 100 feet in the air, a drone can’t verify a one-inch anchor bolt or make sure a plumbing bead lands precisely inside a wall.
“When you’re trying to verify anchor bolts for steel column connections, they’re like 1-inch bolts,” Williams says. “From 100 feet in the air, you can’t get that close of images.” The same thing happened with the plumbing cuts that had to land inside a wall.
This left a known void. The drone could tell the team that something looked more or less right, but it couldn’t confirm the details. When these discrepancies went unnoticed until the steel arrived, schedules suffered, and rework was costly.
Before adopting GNSS, CORE Construction’s only options for detailed verification were unreliable manual measurements or paying for an unscheduled visit from a licensed surveyor.
The check before the surveyor’s call
CORE retains licensed surveyors on every project, but out-of-range calls pile up quickly. Carrying the full survey in-house was impractical due to licensing requirements.
Instead, the company found a middle ground by using Emlid Reach receivers that run RTK (real-time kinematics) corrections that lock in centimeter accuracy on the fly. Now, a superintendent can verify a design instantly.
“It’s a good secondary option to identify if we have a problem, and then we can call a surveyor,” says Williams. “It’s like a step in between.”
CORE Construction does not construct the GNSS receiver data or treat it as the official survey. It acts as an internal double check and transforms field communication from “we think there might be a problem” to “we definitely have a problem.”
Better questions, faster answers
Verification is half the value. Technology is also changing the way CORE Construction interacts with subcontractors.
When importing survey data and subcontractor drawings into the Emlid Flow field application, the office, field and subcontractors are reading from the same georeferenced map. When a superintendent who understands this data reaches out to a business partner, the exchange becomes shorter.
“So many times I’ve asked a more polite question and I get exactly what I need right away,” says Lindsay. “Compared to them asking for it for months.”
This is the part that a general contractor feels in every trade on the job. A sharper question, backed by data that anyone can see, ends a back-and-forth that used to stretch for weeks. Business partners spend less time solving problems and more time building.
Putting GNSS in the hands of field teams
Lindsay handpicks the people he thinks will get the most out of a receiver (usually superintendents who already feel the pain) and passes them himself. Often, he only uses it for them for the first time. This is usually all that is needed.
The company is now using multiple units of the Reach RS3, RS4 and RS4 Pro receivers and is treating the current stage as a beta, on purpose, in three regions to gather a range of feedback. In Texas, most are superintendents and assistant superintendents. A team in Arizona working off-site that would otherwise have called for a total station uses GNSS. A team in Reno is putting it to work along with the startup.
Data moves seamlessly between platforms. CORE Construction transfers DXF files between Emlid and DroneDeploy. He recently brought his DroneDeploy imagery into Emlid Flow as a map layer, so the same drone footage that shows the big picture is under the centimeter-level controls. And because projects are synced through the Emlid Flow 360 cloud platform, a point a superintendent collects in the field arrives in the office without anyone emailing a file.
Expansion: From Field Beta to Standard Operating Procedure
During the summer of 2026, Williams plans to analyze the beta data to establish a standardized framework for enterprise-wide GNSS deployment.
It’s part of a larger trend in construction technology: moving accurate data out of the office and directly into the field. By putting these tools directly into the hands of superintendents, general contractors can catch costly mistakes early without slowing down the schedule.
For CORE Construction, the days of guessing or waiting for an outside surveyor are over. A superintendent can now spot a potential problem, check it in minutes, and move forward with data-driven confidence. Catching a massive mistake before the concrete is poured is no longer a stroke of luck, just workflow.
