A Conversation With ... Mel Eakins

There’s been a renewed energy in infrastructure investment nationwide in recent years, and certainly in the state with former Gov. Mike Parson’s focus on highway improvements. How is that impacting your operations as a civil engineering firm?
It’s helped us to grow considerably. We’ve had double digit growth now for at least the last five years. A lot of that’s through public grants and loan programs, and then also local taxes that the communities are supporting for infrastructure improvements. With that growth, the main thing that it does is that it helps our communities to improve their existing infrastructure and then to also build new infrastructure so that they can grow and enhance the community. For our staff, it helps too because it gives them opportunities to grow in their career. (Our workforce) grew about 15% last year.

What are some of the projects you’re working on out of the Springfield office, on the public and the private side?
About 80% of our work is public, 20% private. We work all over the state, but some of the projects that we are working on locally is the Jefferson Avenue Footbridge, that’s getting ready to go under construction and that’s a pretty iconic project in the city of Springfield. In Branson, Country Music Boulevard, we’re doing improvements, and then also their Historic Downtown Streetscape Project. Other ones here in Springfield, the Fassnight Creek Greenway, so that is improving the road and the greenway from Glenstone to Enterprise. We do bridge projects all over the state and some of the other bridge projects that we’re doing are the Green Bridge in Christian County and, it’s complete now, but a recent one that we did was bridges on the Kansas [Expressway] extension project.

What innovations are you seeing in your industry?
In my career, I haven’t seen the math and science behind what we do change. But literally everything else changes. The software and technology changes; the computers; the rules, regulations and laws in which we work in; public and client expectations change over time, so we’re constantly having to evolve. For example, drones. That’s had a huge impact on the way we survey. We used to go out and do topographic surveying on the ground. A big topographic survey might take us days or weeks, whereas we can do it in less than an hour with the drone. When we get that information back, it does take a long time in the office to process that and then we need to make sure that we understand the technology and the software so that we make sure that our end product is accurate. But it’s been great, that innovation. Then augmented reality. Historically, we produce paper, black and white, two-dimensional plan sheets. That model of telling contractors how to build what we are designing has been around for hundreds of years. Still to this day, our end product is a set of black and white paper prints, but the software that we used to do that is much more developed. Now, instead of drawing in two dimensions, we draw in three dimensions, and with that we can create three dimensional models of our products. We can make an immersive, three-dimensional, realistic looking version of our product that we can look at on the computer. We can use that both in-house to check what we’ve designed and see if it’s what we think it should be, but also we can use it to show our clients what we’re designing. They can’t always understand those two-dimensional drawings, but they can understand the picture or a video. It helps us with the public. We can use them in public meetings to explain what we’re doing to our stakeholders.

How do you see your industry evolving?
I see the day in the not-so-distant future where our work product is no longer a set of black and white prints, but instead it’s a computer model that we hand over and it has all the information in it. We spend a lot of time building a three-dimensional model to then use that three-dimensional model to go back in time, basically, and produce drawings like were produced a hundred years ago. The industry moves slow to accept change, and that’s the way it’s been for everybody’s entire careers that’s in this field right now. But it’s already starting to move that way. Contractors are now also requesting our electronic files.

How might these changes shift the types of roles in engineering?
If I go back 20 or 30 years, there might’ve been two or three draftspeople per engineer working on a project. Now that’s changed to where it’s just the opposite. There might be two or three engineers per draftsperson. I see it requiring a professional degree to hold most jobs within the organization.

Has that technology allowed you to become more efficient?
The design goes faster, but there’s also been an increase in the regulation, the amount of paperwork, the amount of permits, the different things that you have to do for the funding and for the regulatory agencies.

Talk about your workforce pipeline and retention.
My first priority is to try to take my existing staff and to help grow them. We work with them to develop a professional development plan. We try to identify what their career goals are for the next three to five years. Based off that we say, OK, if that’s your goal in the next three to five years, what’s your goal for the next 12 months? Then what do you need to do in the next 90 days and what does the company need to do in the next 90 days so that you can meet that one-year and three-to-five-year goal? We work to make sure that we give that person both the opportunities and/or training and/or resources so that they can meet it. If everybody in the company is advancing toward their goals and getting better all the time, that makes my workforce as strong as it can be. As far as new people, especially when it comes to engineers, we try to catch them when they’re really young. We are working with the universities and going to career fairs. We’ll bring them in as freshmen or sophomore as interns, and then we’d like to get them to come back every summer or every break and train them and build them. Then at the point when they graduate from college, they’re hitting the ground running, they already know our systems, they already know our processes and they’re being an effective part of the team. It’s very competitive. When we go to the career fairs, we’re getting ready to go (in mid-February) to Rolla to (Missouri) S&T, and there’s way more employers there than there is candidates.