Celebrating 30 Years

In 1988, Richard Chasman founded InSite Software Inc. and was soon joined by Steve Warfle. The need for cost effective excavation take-off software was key to the company’s early success. InSite SiteWork solved the problem of manual earthwork calculations that were extremely time consuming. Capitalizing on the early PCs ability to handle repetitive calculations, InSite SiteWork coupled with a digitizer tablet could save 5 times the labor needed for earthwork take-off and greatly improved accuracy.

InSite’s next innovation was a trench module that used dirt grades to generate profiles and calculate accurate trench excavation quantities. As the technology evolved, site balancing, CAD and PDF Import and built-in layout tools were added to keep customers productive.

The company feels lucky having great customers who weren’t afraid to vocalize what they wanted. InSite staff used to joke that feature requests always started with ‘How hard would it be?’. In 1990 Steve Warfle made an in-person sales call to Greg Kirchner at B B & L Construction Services, located Albany, NY. Greg asked why you couldn’t just circle any area and get the cut & fill for it. After the sales visit, Steve came back to the office and called a few customers and of course confirmed it was a desirable feature. InSite calls it Area Cut & Fill. B B & L is still a great customer.

The founders always believed that quality training and technical support are essential to a customer’s success and decided early on that 24-hour service was important. This commitment to customer service continues to this day. “Way back when we had ‘brick’ cell phones and pagers I was fishing on the St Lawrence river and received a technical support call,” said Steve Warfle. “I inadvertently picked up a Canadian cell tower helping the customer. When we received the bill, that single call cost over $100 dollars, but the customer had a deadline and couldn’t wait. We strive for that level of customer service with every customer.”

Field General Office was launched in 2004 and originally started as a combination laptop and wireless display combined with a robotic total station. As a one-person solution, Field General was ahead of its time. Users could pick a point of a CAD file on the wireless tablet and be guided right to that exact point. After data collectors became more robust and GPS machine control was maturing, Field General was enhanced to focus more on data preparation of layout points and model creation. A good take-off from a vector-based PDF or CAD file can be quickly embellished using Field General and sent to any brand of GPS system, minimizing the time spent model building.

In 2018 the company hired Doug Chasman as its new CTO/Chief Architect. His vast experience brings fresh ideas for the immediate and distant future.

“I am very thankful for the successful relationships we have with our customers,” said Doug. “Our continued success is the result of the hard work of our sales and support teams. Every day they ensure InSite users are as productive and accurate as possible.”