Engineering firm adds staff, develops software product

Discussions about how to weather the recession led to development of a new Web-based software program that will come online in March and is projected to add hundreds of support positions to wetlands specialist Huffman & Carpenter of Reno.

Huffman & Carpenter recently added 10 new positions to help develop its CoreJD program, which analyzes satellite imagery to determine the types of vegetation on a piece of land and will significantly reduce fieldwork.

The Huffman & Carpenter team looked at its strengths, including its reputation as a wetlands specialist. The staff came up with idea to produce a Web-based version of its internal software graphic information system software that uses Global Positioning System to map out the environmental constraints of a piece of property.

"If you look at the land mass, the kind of soils and geology, you know what types of species can live there, and if you know the habitat type, you can do wide watershed areas very quickly," says Lori Carpenter, senior regulatory scientist. "You could send 10 people to the field and they could spend two weeks, and we could give you the same result using remote sensing in half the time. And we would have just two people doing that.

"We knew if we could offer a Web-based solution that was cost-effective and saved half the time in the field and 90 percent of the time in the office that we would have a seller."

Carpenter says specialists typically need about a year to get a wetlands delineation through a federal agency. The software can reduce that time to 12 weeks.

"That is going to matter to developers, bankers, title companies, investors, anyone who has anything to do with land entitlement and land development," she says.

Development of the software cost $1.2 million, part of which was funded through a $400,000 loan through the Small Business Administration and Nevada State Bank. The loan helped guarantee salaries for two years. Formed in 1991, Huffman & Carpenter employs twenty-three.

The company's software development team is located across the United States as well as in Finland and 20 employees in India. By writing the code internally, Huffman & Carpenter saved $1.1 million.

"We bootstrapped this thing. We are not beholden to investors," Carpenter says.

The company expects to employ 50 by the time the program launches in March, and it could employ as many as 500 over the next four years, with 100 fulltime positions based in Reno. Many of the new positions will be call and help center support. The newest hires will train additional employees.

Carpenter says the CorpsJD program could potentially save the Army Corps of Engineers as much as $17 million to $50 million a year by speeding data-entry for wetlands delineations.

"We can save their staff countless hours and the consulting community staff countless hours," Carpenter says. "We believe that the time savings to our industry alone will be over $2 billion a year."