Inside Dewberry’s Construction Sequencing Viewer
Turning design data into a digital service.
For decades, the standard deliverable in architecture and engineering has been a static drawing — a PDF, a hard copy, maybe a model the client can’t open. Dewberry’s Construction Sequencing Viewer (CSV) rethinks that handoff. Built entirely in-house, the CSV takes the firm’s design data and layers it onto a familiar, Google Maps-style interface — complete with a time slider that lets clients step through construction phasing, secure logins, and field access that turns a phone into a live reference point on site.
We spoke with Cody Pennetti of Dewberry about how the CSV came to be, what it took to make it enterprise-ready, and why the firm sees it less as a revenue line and more as a way to stay embedded in its clients’ work. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dewberry is a semi-finalist for the AEC Innovators Award. You can vote for them and learn more about the award at kpreddy.co/aec-innovators.
The CSV reframes project phasing as a repeatable digital service rather than a one-off deliverable. What told you this was a product and not just a better drawing?
Most of our deliverables on the AEC side are static — a PDF, a hard copy, or at best, “here’s the model.” But our customers have become familiar with tools like Google Earth. They know how to navigate a map and see context. And they kept asking questions like: “You’re showing me what the project looks like at the end, but how do I get there? What do the steps look like?”
That’s what led us to take all the design data we already produce and turn it into something that tells a better story. It’s the same information, but reformatted, hosted, shared, and access-controlled with real security. In this format it becomes far more useful — especially to customers who aren’t going to buy really expensive CAD software and then figure out how to use it.
Let’s take a step back — how did the project actually get started?
We recognized a need across a few of our services. We create all this design content, and the deliverables are generally PDFs. But these days we have really detailed design data, and clients are interested in seeing it in other formats — even the original source data. The problem is CAD and BIM software is expensive. So we were creating one-off exhibits, sending another PDF, and clients would say, “Well, I want to move around. I want to click on it. I want to see this other information.”
We said: if clients are familiar with Google Earth and Google Maps, why don’t we build a secure app that puts our design data on top of that? And because it’s digital, we could add things like time series and phasing. We have a lot of transportation clients where a project might have 15 steps to build a new interchange. They can flip through 15 pages and hope the community understands — or use a time slider that steps through each phase.
The other bonus: countless times we’ve been on a site, pulling out a big drawing and trying to orient ourselves. With this app, you bring it into the field and see yourself as a dot, moving around what will be there. There are heavier ways to do this with 3D, AR, and VR, but for big infrastructure across large areas, a map format is often exactly what you want.
Who’s actually opening this up in the field — an owner, a DOT inspector, the public? How did that shape the design?
Everybody saw value in it. Take a large-scale utility pipeline — you want to follow where that line is going, and there often aren’t great reference points. Seeing it on a map, with yourself as a dot, was valuable to clients and the community, who could pull it up and say, “Where is this relative to that building?” And for our own engineers, instead of sending a survey team out for a few days to stake something out, you can bring the app into the field and say, “That new line or road or building is going to be around this point” — plus or minus the phone’s GPS, but close enough to give you real context.
The CSV sits alongside other Dewberry viewer apps, including a LAR reality-capture viewer. What’s the through line in how you’re rethinking client access to project data?
They all came from the same need: clients asking for lots of extra static deliverables, or asking for our CAD and BIM files at the end of a project when they don’t have the software or the expertise to use them.
So we built a family of web viewers. The Parallel View app is the 3D, BIM-based one — if you own the building, you can click on the data, see the model number, move around your 3D model in a browser without installing anything. What that doesn’t show is geographic context, and that’s where CSV comes in — it’s our infrastructure-heavy viewer, dropping big CAD design data onto a real map so you can see it alongside other geospatial layers like floodplains or weather.
The LAR viewer solved a different version of the same problem: reality-capture data is terabytes, which is brutal to transfer, and then the client still needs software to open it. We put that in a web viewer too. Our design teams appreciate it — a lot of it is read-only, so there’s built-in data protection and ownership — and clients just click a link, log in like any other app, and see the data they want.
What surprised you most about what clients actually wanted once they got their hands on it?
One of the big things we had to pace ourselves on: we were coming at it from the architect-and-engineer lens. We know the models, we know the software, we want to see a ton of data. What we actually did was intentionally keep it simple — or at least hide the complexity a few layers back. Open up any CAD or BIM tool and you’re overwhelmed by buttons and menus. We asked, “What are the three things clients actually care about?”
Our backlog of other features is getting pretty big, but for now the simplicity is a differentiator. You click on it, you understand what to do. It feels like Google Maps — familiar, clean, not 500 options.
What did it take to get this enterprise-ready — authentication, project roles — versus just a local prototype?
That was a significant effort. We’d stood up websites and services as an organization before, but we’d never done anything as a subscription service. That was a new model for us.
We worked with our IT folks to set up a NIST enclave so it’s secure, added authenticators for the login system, tied that into user access controls, and connected it to subscriptions by user count — 10, 25, 100 users. We ran it by our legal team and brought in an outside consultant to help write the terms of service and privacy policy. There was a lot to learn as an AEC team moving into technology-type services.
The base technology and a local version were done probably six months before we launched. It was one of those moments of “we’re done — but now we have to do the other half.” The upside is we now have a template. The other apps go faster because we’ve been through it: we’ve got the enclave, the account management, the infrastructure. Building the next one is mostly slight changes to the terms of service.
You expect this to launch publicly later this year. What’s the biggest adoption hurdle?
This is very much intended as a service for our clients — we don’t expect people to stumble upon the app and upload their own content. Our engineering services are at the core.
So the real work is internal. We’re working with our project managers to communicate it out. When a client asks for a view of the model or a 3D rendering, the PM can say, “Good news — here’s one of these systems.” Client asks for a Google Earth file? “Forget that, let’s get you over here.” There are also internal incentives: sell the subscription, we build the infrastructure, and that revenue goes back to your team and business unit, because they’re effectively the ones selling it.
Beyond that, it’s web-based, there’s nothing to download, no custom software. We built it that way so clients have low friction. It’s really about getting our PMs comfortable selling that type of service.
Why should this matter to someone evaluating Dewberry’s innovation right now — beyond the tool itself?
There’s a small subset of architecture and engineering firms that have this blend of the A, the E, and the C — plus geospatial and software development. Everything we’re talking about was done in-house, apart from outside counsel on the terms of service. It’s a software development team learning what it means to provide civil data and services, and civil teams saying, “We can get smart about how we use our technology.” Together, that became a fairly light lift — versus buying someone else’s product, trying to get clients to buy it too, and generating no additional revenue because we’re just reselling what somebody else built. These apps intentionally use open source we’ve developed on top of, or APIs from systems we already pay for, repackaged.
The core intent, as our C-level folks like to say, is that this keeps us sticky. The revenue isn’t the biggest part — it’s that clients are living in our services. They go, “I need to add an extension, I want to build the next part of this road,” and they’re looking at our content, our maps, our logo at the top, and they say, “Let’s bring these guys back on.” And competitively, if a client has a choice and sees our team already has the models organized and ready to go, they start with us. It’s the next evolution from having our logo on a hard copy they happen to unroll — this becomes their go-to asset management resource, and it connects them back to us.
As this scales across more project types, where do clients need the most help changing how their teams work with it?
The apps are meant to be intuitive, so training should be light. What we expect — and are already seeing in early conversations — is that clients start getting ideas. Once the data is in this format, they ask, “What if I do this, this, and this?” That’s the exciting opportunity: those are our traditional consulting services, and we’re happy to do that work. The platform is the gateway.
CSV is deliberately simple: design files cleaned up, put into a Google Maps-style format, simplified access, with features like sticky notes, sharing, clickable data, and the time slider. But almost immediately, clients and staff started asking, “What about traffic? What about weather?” And we can say: it can handle it — those are extra services, let’s start building on top of it. That was the intent all along. Get them introduced to something familiar and clean, and then they come back with twenty other things on their mind.