HJC finds an extra crash-cushion callout in about 30 seconds
From 30 minutes or more to about 30 seconds—and one more callout found.
HJC uses Bidlo agents to extract plan information for spreadsheets and crew schedules. In one crash-cushion review, the agent found five callouts where the plan quantity called for four. Kevin Lillard reports that the task took about 30 seconds, compared with the 30 minutes or more he normally spends on that kind of review.
About HJC
HJC Farms, Inc. is a family-owned Texas TxDOT contractor founded in 1992. Its work includes guardrail, traffic barriers, road signs, concrete, cable barriers, and trucking.
Plan details become inputs to the team’s spreadsheets, bids, and crew schedules. Finding the relevant information is an early part of getting that work ready.
The problem
Extracting information from a plan set takes attention. The team needs to locate the relevant callouts, check what they show, and carry the information into the documents used to prepare the work.
Kevin Lillard, HJC’s Director of Business Development, described the time required for the kind of review featured in this example:
This normally takes me 30 minutes or more
The team also reports that agents catch details it does not always catch manually. A faster extraction is useful, but so is another way to check what appears in the plans.
Giving the first pass to an agent
HJC uses Bidlo agents to find and extract information from construction plans. The extracted information supports the Excel documents and crew schedules the team prepares.
In the crash-cushion example, the task was to locate the CCA callouts. The agent returned its findings in about 30 seconds, according to Kevin, and surfaced a count that differed from the quantity shown in the plans.
How it works
The team identifies the plan information it needs and uses a Bidlo agent to extract it. HJC can then review the findings before using them in a spreadsheet, bid, or crew schedule.
For the crash-cushion review, that means checking the callouts against the stated quantity and investigating why the counts differ. An additional callout is a reason to revisit the plans; HJC still needs to establish what it represents and whether the working quantity should change.
🖼️ Image: Sanitized plan quantity of four beside Bidlo’s five CCA callouts.
What changed
The plan quantity called for four crash cushions. The agent found five CCA callouts, giving HJC a specific discrepancy to investigate.
That finding could help the team account for a quantity issue before it carries into a bid or crew plan. The supplied example does not establish whether all five callouts represented required units, or whether the review led to a financial saving.
The immediate outcome was a faster first pass and an additional detail brought to the team’s attention.
Results
Kevin reports that the extraction took about 30 seconds for a task that normally takes him 30 minutes or more. The comparison describes this example and his usual manual process, rather than an average across HJC’s projects.
The agent also returned five callouts against a stated quantity of four, giving the team something concrete to check before using the result downstream.
In about thirty seconds, it identified all of them and found more callouts than the plans called for
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See how Bidlo can help your team extract plan details and bring discrepancies into view for review.
Source notes
- Company history and services: HJC Farms, Inc. official website.
- Bidlo workflow, quotes, and results: customer notes supplied from Kevin Lillard. The example is customer-reported.