KOREC Partnership

A new standard for site measurement

We’ve always prided ourselves on precision steelwork. But for years our site surveying relied on tape measures, notebooks and a two-person team — and honestly, it showed its limits on the trickier jobs. That’s why we partnered with KOREC, a leading Trimble technology supplier, to bring the Trimble X9 3D laser scanner into our workshop. The result? A transformation in how we capture site data, and a 40% drop in rework across the board.

Why we needed to change

A site visit meant pens, paper, tape measures and a prayer the weather held. Soggy notes, cramped scaffolding, missed dimensions — it only took one small error on a busy site to cascade into return visits, project delays and fabrication that didn’t fit. We knew we could do better.

“Our main aim was to eliminate revisit trips entirely. A missed dimension on site can ripple through the whole chain — more site visits, lost time, and expensive refabrication. We needed a single, complete, accurate dataset from day one.” — Steven Cane, Drawing Office Manager.

How the X9 fits our workflow

Two things made the X9 the obvious choice. First, we’re fabricators, not professional surveyors — whatever we picked had to be straightforward enough for our team to use from day one. And second, we already work in Tekla Structures, so the ability to import point clouds directly for modelling and clash detection was a natural fit. KOREC recommended the Trimble X9 Core with Perspective tablet software and RealWorks for office processing, and after a single day of training we were scanning live sites.

The features that made the biggest difference on site:

• Automatic on-site registration — scans stitch together as you go, no targets, no setup time wasted.
• 360° panoramic images — our design team can see the full site context without leaving the office.
• Laser pointer annotation — mark up features the draughtsman needs to know about, right there on the scan.
• Window scan mode — focus on a single junction or bracket at high resolution for precise modelling.
• Lightweight and portable — one person can carry the whole kit in a backpack and scan a complex site in minutes.

Even team members who were sceptical at first were won over after their first session. The X9 went from “why do we need this?” to “can we take it on every job?” in the space of a single site visit.

The real numbers

After a year of using the scanner full-time, the figures speak for themselves:

• a 40% reduction in rework across the workshop
• site-to-fabrication turnaround slashed — measurements that once took two people half a day now take one person under an hour
• the confidence to price and deliver jobs we’d have turned down before, because manual surveying couldn’t guarantee the accuracy needed

“The X9 has catapulted our ability to measure and model by a factor of ten. We’re capturing data now that just wasn’t possible before. It’s genuinely changed the way we work.”

Three projects that prove the point

Tunnels Beaches Hotel, Ilfracombe — a Victorian hotel carved into rugged cliffs, with a proposed new suite perched above the rocks. Mapping the uneven cliff edge to millimetre precision with manual methods would have been near-impossible. With the X9, one person set up four stations on the roof, four minutes per scan, and the entire cliff face was captured perfectly. The steelwork went in first time, zero issues.

Private curved railings — sweeping arcs that would have meant hours of manual measurement, multiple return visits and guesswork. Six scan setups in thirty minutes gave us a perfect point cloud. We rolled the steel to exact shape in the workshop and it fit on site without a single adjustment.

Sunburst canopy — a structure several metres above ground, with steelwork needing to hit multiple points at different elevations. Ladders and tape measures weren’t going to cut it. The X9 captured the whole environment in one pass, and we modelled the canopy to fit exactly — all from the safety of the office.

Read the full story on the KOREC website →