How Kimley-Horn Used 4M to Win Aspen Airport Contract

Customer Profile

Kimley-Horn is one of the country’s premier engineering, planning, and design consulting firms. It started as a traffic organization in North Carolina and has grown to more than 8,000 employees in more than 120 offices across the US. It provides full services across a range of disciplines and prides itself on exceptional client service and creative solutions.  

Background

Kimley-Horn’s pursuit of the Aspen Airport contract faced tight deadlines and taxiway-access complexities. To overcome these hurdles, the team turned to 4M’s Utility AI Mapping Platform for instant access to utility data you can trust and verify—all in one platform. 4M's data transformed a complex pursuit into a clear competitive edge—landing Kimley-Horn at the top of Aspen Airport’s shortlist and ultimately securing the contract.

Key Results

• Accurate, Competitive Bids: With 4M’s On-Surface Utility Object Detection, Kimley-Horn was able to identify exactly how much work was needed, allowing them to submit a precise proposal without ever putting boots on the runway or taxiway.

• Higher Client Satisfaction. Kimley-Horn is proud of its commitment to excellent client care, even when project timelines and scope change quickly or when it’s working on a complicated project like an airport. With 4M, it can confidently provide that service because it has reliable utility data early, making every infrastructure project smarter, faster, and safer.  

• Faster Timelines and Fewer Delays. Critical projects like airport runway renovations, where even a day of delay has major knock-on effects for the entire community, need instant access to reliable utility data to avoid delays. 4M delivers that for Kimley-Horn.  

• Reduction in Project Risks. With 4M, Kimley-Horn can identify and mitigate utility conflicts early, preventing costly redesigns and delays.

• More Wins. With 4M, Kimley-Horn delivers clients a transparent, clear scope of work when entering a bid, which helps them earn client trust and win more projects.

Straight from the Source

Hear what Chris Howard, SUE Division Lead at Kimley-Horn, had to say about his teams experience with 4M.

Challenge: The Slow Status Quo

The utility research and investigation status quo is extremely time-consuming and inefficient for Kimley-Horn and for everyone else in the industry. Before even submitting a bid, the team at Kimley-Horn would need to request SUE and utility information from multiple sources, and within a 10-day timeframe they’d typically get less than a 50% response rate — potentially waiting for up to a month to receive the information.

Once the information does come in, it’s in a variety of formats: schematics, blueprints, even pen-and-paper drawings. Then, it takes additional time to assemble everything together, massage the data to create a base map, and send people out into the field to finalize that map. It’s manual, messy, and slow — and this is all before even submitting a bid.

“That timeframe of the status quo is really what hurts a lot of us in the end,” says Chris Howard, SUE Division Lead at Kimley-Horn.

Does this look familiar…

And individual projects have added challenges as well. Kimley-Horn’s recent work with Aspen Airport to renovate their runway was a thrilling project pursuit, but one with some big hurdles. First, airports don’t like to close (for obvious and excellent reasons), either for the work or for utility discovery, nor can they have multiple people running around on the runway when they’re open.

Also, the project kept expanding in scope during the bidding process and layers were added. It’s not possible to send out teams on the ground every time that happens, and there was also a short window for these works due to the weather in Aspen.

“As we were going through this process and identifying all these different utility objects, other questions came up, and they wanted to add to the project as we were going,” says Howard. “And in that status quo timeframe, that would propel this into a whole new timeframe.”

As a highly customer-focused firm, Kimley-Horn wanted to provide an exceptional client experience, but that just wasn’t possible on this project with traditional tools. That’s why they were excited to partner with 4M to help them deliver this experience.

Solution: Utility AI Mapping

Howard and Kimley-Horn have found multiple use cases for 4M across their projects, including in pursuits that helped them win the Aspen Airport project. They were able to bid accurately and quickly, adjust how they proposed on the project in real-time with all these changes, and create an exact schedule of when they’d need to schedule airport closures to expand the runway — because they had instant access to reliable utility data at their fingertips.

“This became wildly invaluable, not only for us, but for the client to really evaluate what’s the best use of their time and how to do that within the timeframe they can close,” notes Howard. “This really propelled us to the front of Aspen’s decision-making because we were able to identify not only things that we can’t go out there and physical verify, but things that they now found were different than what they had previously thought and had expanded on the project because of it.”

4M has been a huge differentiator for Kimley-Horn in winning projects — not just making their proposal process easier and more effective (although that’s certainly a benefit), but also really broadening the service they can provide to their clients for their projects and burnishing their reputation as a premier planning and design consulting firm.

They also use 4M across various stages of the construction lifecycle, not just in planning. This helps their team win more pursuits, plan and design confidently, and mitigate risk early on.

“We run a 4M utility map at every phase because your platform is constantly updating. We want to make sure that we have real-time utility information.”

And as changes, expansions, and new ideas come up during the project, Kimley-Horn’s team can make immediate adjustments in real-time without putting boots on the ground or requesting utility data from multiple sources again and again.

This ability to pivot quickly and reliably makes them highly responsive to their clients’ needs and desires, winning further customer trust and future bids. “It’s been invaluable throughout our process,” says Howard.

That’s not to say that 4M’s data can capture absolutely everything they might encounter in a project. In airports, for example, some of the airside data isn’t available through 4M because it’s not publicly available. But Howard’s team could still use 4M’s Utility Object Detection to map surface objects as a good baseline to start the process without going out to the field right away.

💡Did you know: 4M’s AI-Powered On-Surface Object Detection has 85% utility coverage, 95% object accuracy, and can all be verified remotely?

“We can infer from the object detection a lot of what utilities are there so we’re not blindly sending our surveyor out there to guess where he’s got to start picking up objects, or our locators when they’re picking up the drainage system within the airport or the runway line,” he says. “They know that these are connecting, and it gives them a good basis to go out there and be able to finish the work that would be missing in that space.”

And when they’re in the throes of the construction phase, Kimley-Horn is still finding that 4M saves them significant time when they uncover something unexpected. Instead of pausing the work for a week or more to research who owns the utility they just spotted, they can go right into 4M and get that data instantly. “Having that capability immediately saves us a lot of man hours,” says Howard.

Finally, 4M has been hugely helpful to the Kimley-Horn team when projects get delayed or shelved for months on end. When the client comes back to re-start or kick off the project, previously, Howard’s team would have to go back out there physically to check if anything had changed in the months since they last checked.

But now, they can check 4M to reliably validate the data they already have and reassure the client that they’re ready to go. If things have changed in the meantime, they might need to go back out there, but at least now it’s not a given, and it often saves them significant time. “It includes boots on the ground to some degree, but we’re using 4M to direct that conversation,” Howard says.

Looking Forward

As Kimley-Horn continues to use 4M’s Utility Object Detection, it’s looking forward to even more powerful features and capabilities coming online, which will enable it to win even more bids and consistently provide exceptional customer experiences.

Howard is particularly excited about an upcoming feature in which 4M will also house and store client data that only the client can access. This will ensure that everything, 4M data and proprietary data alike, is in one easy-to-use place. This will also create a 360-degree feedback loop with additional data accuracy and validation.

“From an SUE standpoint, being able for 4M to use our data with us for future projects is going to be invaluable — being able to close that loop, so to speak, and use it and update that same information as we move forward. Having not only our information but 4M information accessible to us is very key to not driving up the cost on a project.”

Schedule time with our experts to learn how 4M helps you save time, money, and headaches with instant, reliable utility data you can trust and verify at every stage of planning, design, and pre-construction.