Insights from ORBA’s 99th Annual Convention

Ontario is building. $70 billion committed to roads and highways. The Ring of Fire opening thousands of kilometres of new infrastructure. Minister Sarkaria announced the 2026 MTO Tenders list at ORBA’s 99th Annual Convention. The work is coming.

But in conversations with contractors, project managers, and municipal owners across the two-day event at the Fairmont Royal York, one concern dominated: margins on underground utility work are disappearing, and the biggest culprit isn’t labour costs or material prices. It’s what the records don’t tell you is buried beneath your feet.

The Margin Killer No One Talks About

During our conversations at the Fairmont Royal York, one theme dominated every discussion about subsurface work: unknowns underground are the single biggest risk in infrastructure projects.

Not “a” risk. The risk.

When you discover an unexpected utility during excavation, the clock doesn’t just pause. It runs backward. Crews stand idle. Equipment sits burning fuel. Your critical path evaporates. And somewhere in a downtown office, your margin disappears while you figure out what’s actually down there.

On a $5M utility project, here’s what that discovery costs:

• 3 days of crew downtime: $18,000
• Equipment sitting idle: $4,500
• Rework on completed sections: $35,000
• Engineering time to resolve conflicts: $12,000
• Schedule compression to make up time: $28,000
• Total: $97,500. That’s 2% of your project value. Gone.

And that assumes you only discover one unexpected utility. Most projects uncover three or four.

The cost isn’t just the immediate delay. It’s the cascade:

• Rework on sections you thought were complete
• Repeated investigations because the records were incomplete
• Change orders you’ll spend six months negotiating
• Cash flow gaps while you wait for approvals

A VP of Operations at a mid-sized utility contractor told us: “We’re not losing money on what we estimated. We’re losing it on what the records didn’t tell us was there.”

The Documentation Gap That Costs You Twice

Here’s what surprised us most at ORBA: when we asked contractors and municipal owners about their biggest pain point, we expected them to say “admin time” or “double data entry.”

They didn’t.

They said: “Information loss.”

Field crews are documenting everything: photos on phones, notes in trucks, observations that could save the next shift hours of discovery work. But that intelligence never makes it into a system anyone can use later. When the next crew arrives, they’re starting from zero. When you need to defend a change order six months later, the evidence is scattered across three people’s devices.

The hidden cost of lost field intelligence:

• Crew discovers conflict on Monday, documents it on their phone
• Tuesday’s shift re-discovers the same issue: 4 hours lost
• PM spends 6 hours Friday reconstructing what actually happened
• Change order gets denied because photos can’t be tied to specific locations
• Result: $12,000 in duplicate work, plus the margin you can’t recover

Multiply that across 10-15 similar incidents per project. You’re looking at $120,000-$180,000 in losses that never show up as a line item. They just evaporate from your bottom line.

The problem isn’t that crews aren’t documenting. It’s that the documentation isn’t captured in a way that protects your margins.

A project manager at a regional sewer contractor put it bluntly: “We’re still managing site intelligence on spreadsheets. Not because we prefer it, but because our existing software doesn’t actually solve the underground documentation problem. It just adds another place to enter data.”

What the Field Actually Needs (According to the Field)

One pattern emerged clearly in our conversations with foremen and project engineers: they don’t want another tool. They want one that actually works.

Software fatigue is real. Teams are exhausted from learning new platforms every year, each promising to revolutionize their workflow, each delivering overlapping functionality that doesn’t integrate with anything else.

When we asked what would make them actually adopt new technology, three requirements came up repeatedly:

1. Capture what matters at the moment it matters. Not 10 clicks later. Not back at the trailer. Right there, at the excavation, when they discover something. If documentation requires breaking workflow, it won’t happen.

2. Speak to payroll and ERP without manual re-entry. A foreman at a municipal contractor was direct: “Packing slips photographed in the field shouldn’t require someone in the office to type them in again. That’s not efficiency. That’s just moving the admin burden.” One system photographing a slip, another person typing it in. That’s not solving anything.

3. Prove value to crews first. Initial interest might come from a VP or Director, but if the field doesn’t see immediate workflow benefit, it won’t stick. One superintendent told us: “Buzzwords don’t survive the jobsite. Show me it works on Tuesday morning with mud on my boots, then we’ll talk.”

The Partnership That Actually Matters

Minister Sarkaria talked about partnership between government and industry. Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser spoke about building strong teams on trust and accountability.

But the partnership that determines whether you protect your margins or lose them happens 12 feet underground, between what your crew discovers and what your office can actually use.

That partnership is broken in most organizations. On a $10M annual project portfolio, it’s costing you $200,000-$300,000 every year.

What We’re Taking Away

The enthusiasm at ORBA was infectious. Ontario is building. The North is opening up. Indigenous partnerships are creating long-term opportunities. The work is coming.

But as Dr. Wickenheiser reminded the room: “The best organizations strive to be the best in the world and the best for the world.”

Being the best means controlling what you can control. On underground utility work, what you can control is how you capture, preserve, and use the intelligence your crews generate in the field.

The contractors who will win the work ahead aren’t the ones with the lowest bid. They’re the ones who can deliver on time, defend their margins when the ground surprises them, and prove what happened underground when the owner asks.

Your Underground Intelligence Strategy

If you’re running subsurface utility projects between $1M-$50M, four questions:

• When your crew discovers an unexpected utility, how long before that intelligence reaches the people who need it?
• Can you reconstruct exactly what was found, where, and when, six months later when defending a change order?
• Are your field records audit-ready, or scattered across phones, notebooks, and email?
• How many times per project does the Tuesday crew re-discover what Monday’s crew already documented?

The projects are coming. The question is whether your documentation system can protect the margins those projects should generate.

On a $10M annual portfolio, the difference between 5% margins and 3% margins is $200,000. Every year.

vSite helps utility contractors on $1M-$50M projects capture, preserve, and use underground intelligence to protect margins. On a typical $5M project, that’s $100,000-$150,000 in margin protection. On a $10M annual portfolio, it’s $200,000-$300,000 per year.

Learn more at vgis.io/vsite