Forte and Tablada brings aboard Engensus Measurements
BATON ROUGE, La. – Forte and Tablada, a firm offering civil, environmental and electrical engineering with headquarters based here, announced this week the acquisition of engineering firm Engensus and its sister company, Engensus Measurements, which specializes in laser scanning and 3D data capture.
Jonathan Coco, who heads up the laser scanning operations at Measurements and is the brother of Engensus co-founder Joey Coco, said being acquired by Forte and Tablada provides them with the resources to really take advantage of the opportunities out there for their scanning services. Even with two employees doing nothing but scanning and modeling, Measurements couldn’t keep up with the work coming through the pipeline, and there was a need for funds to upgrade computing equipment.
“It was just a manpower issue,” he said. “You can cover a lot of ground with a laser scanner in one day, and that adds up, depending on the project, to days of work in the back office, no matter how good you are … We couldn’t really attack the large-scale projects.”
Now, combined with Forte and Tablada, “we’re working on the largest project we’ve ever one. We’ve got one in the pipeline that’s even larger and then another that will be another good-sized project.” It was easy to hit the ground running, as the two organizations had already worked together a number of times: “We’ve done engineering work for them, done measurement work for them, and vice versa. They’ve done electrical engineering work for us.”
Further, Engensus had relationships with both Baton Rouge Land Surveying and civil engineering firm BBC, which Forte and Tablada acquired in 2007 and 2010, respectively. “BRLS was the group we would hire if we were scanning and needed someone to georeference and shoot our targets,” Coco said. “And some of the projects that they couldn’t laser scan before, and they would just shoot with a total station, we showed them some scanning stuff and they realized where it made sense to use the laser scanner. Our first project right off the bat was with the survey group, scanning bridges and doing some roadway work.”
There’s also something to be said for the virality of the Internet. “We’re all pretty excited to work together,” Coco said. “The first time I walked over there and walked into the area where the CAD guys are, they knew me right away as the guy who made the point cloud fly through of LSU’s Tiger Stadium – I had no idea that people were watching that for fun! It’s really encouraging to see people who want to do neat things and want to push the envelope and I see that over there at Forte and Tablada and it feels good to have more people around us who want to do that.”
Go ahead, have some fun. Watch the Tiger Stadium clip:
