Since the inception of earth moving, equipment operators have taken their references from stakes pounded in the ground by surveyors.  Once the stakes were set by the surveyor, they would be moved and reset many times as the project unfolded.  Today, grade stakes are rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to the use of Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) which send signals to earth.  Onboard GPS monitors allow the operator to grade any given area on the site with a single pass.

Berger was one of the first contractors in Northern Illinois to adopt an integrated machine GPS system in 1999.  Since that time, Berger has continually evolved their GPS techniques and integration as the technology has improved.  A video monitor mounted in the cab of the equipment allows the operator to view the cut/fill areas of the jobsite.  The benefits of this are immediate with increased speed and extreme accuracy.

With the use of GPS, supervisors no longer spend their day resetting and transferring grades, thus they can focus on planning and reducing cycle times of equipment.  At the end of the day, daily production logs are transmitted back to the home office for project managers to review productivity against the original schedule.