130 Business View - November 2015
the bigger size.” But regardless of size, what gives Kucera
an organizational edge over the competition is that it is a
one-stop-shop. “The advantage of our organization is that
we do all of the services,” Antalovich says. “There are dif-
ferent phases of our work. One is the acquisition, itself, of
the aerial data. Then there are a number of processes that
you go through to extract data from what you collect, and
some companies do only portions of those phases. We do
all that work internally. So we do the aerial capture, and all
of the mapping work and data extraction work, in-house.
That gives us a competitive advantage in terms of being
able to get work done quickly and cost-effectively. It also
enables us to have better control over quality, since it’s all
done in- house and monitored, internally.”
Staying ahead of the technology curve is another way in
which Kucera exhibits its leadership in the industry. For ex-
ample, the company provides LiDAR services with its own
Leica-manufactured, LiDAR system. “For the last ten years,
at least, it’s been a very sought-after service,” Antalovich
says. “It’s basically laser mapping - shooting a laser beam
down from the plane that bounces off of the surface of the
ground and other surfaces. A GPS unit is integrated with
the sensor, so if you know your position, and you know the
speed of light, and you can measure the time that it takes
the laser beam to go down and come back, then you know
the elevation of the ground that it rebounds off of.”
Of course, none of the new technologies that Kucera em-
ploys for the benefits of its customers’ particular needs
come cheap. “The sensors that we use are very expen-
sive,” Antalovich asserts. “They’re actually more expen-
sive than the aircraft in many cases. They’re specially
designed; they’re not your average digital camera that
you would buy for personal use. They’re very large-format
and they have very sophisticated GPS inertial measuring
units that are integrated into them to capture all the data,
digitally. So, a typical sensor system costs anywhere from
MANUFACTURING
