QuikCal: From First-Year Design Idea to Reality

For the last eight years, a rite of passage for new Duke Engineering students has been the First-Year Design (EGR101) course. Multidisciplinary teams of students are tasked with building prototype solutions to problems presented by real clients.

In 2021, one of those clients was Evan Reilly, a civil and environmental engineering alum working for Skanska USA, one of the largest construction companies in the world. Reilly’s problem? The method for scheduling deliveries at construction sites was too scattershot.

The two-step process usually went like this: A contracting company called the site office when they wanted to come, and then an office superintendent made a note on a team whiteboard. It was simple, but maybe too simple. With dozens of delivery groups to coordinate, mix-ups often occurred.

Ken Kalin and Del Cudjoe, now seniors in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and computer science (CS), worked on this problem for Reilly as first years in EGR101 and into a second semester through EGR102. They developed a solution with simple web forms and a backend that could send reminder texts, though in hindsight, Kalin admits it didn’t work very well.

“But we passed the class!” he said. “And then we didn’t think about it for a while.”

Fast forward to the summer of 2023. OpenAI had shocked the world with the unveiling of ChatGPT months before. Kalin was toying with the generative AI tool with his friend and fellow ECE and CS student Alec Liu when he realized they could use it to supercharge the lackluster first-year design product.

“With the help of AI, we thought wow, we can make this idea a lot better,” Kalin said.

More than a year later, the three Duke Engineering students have built QuikCal, a fledgling startup that has demonstrated great promise in streamlining delivery communication.

Developing the Software

Although the technology involved is advanced, QuikCal is designed to be simple for end users.

The QuikCal team – comprised of Kalin as CEO, Cudjoe as COO and Liu as CTO – built a product that uses and augments ChatGPT’s capabilities. Each construction site is assigned a phone number, and anyone can text with a chatbot on that number to schedule deliveries.

“Ken kicked things off when he realized ChatGPT could be the missing piece,” Liu said. “ChatGPT was great at extracting the core meaning of a phrase, so we could leverage it to process freeform message into meaningful event data. From there, we started laying out easier ways to submit a lot of data at once, and I proposed using optical character recognition to scan images of the delivery board.”

Besides the natural language processing and image scanning, QuikCal now includes automated text reminders and integrations with Google Calendar.

Piloting the Program

With their new ideas for QuikCal, the team got back in contact with Reilly. He connected them with the Wake County Public Health Center project, a $117 million Skanska job in Raleigh.

Over a 10-week pilot during the summer, the Skanska site used QuikCal and, as the name implies, saw quick results. Advanced notice times for deliveries increased from less than a day to more than a week – a 300 percent improvement, which also translates into roughly $2 million in cost savings.

QuikCal proved beneficial to all parties involved and the participation among delivery drivers was high, thanks in part to the easier implementation of texting rather than downloading a separate app.

Feedback from the pilot has also been enormously helpful to the QuikCal team members, who were eager to see the prototype deployed in a live environment. They continually tweaked the product for each new variable they encountered – such as the need to prioritize concrete companies in scheduling or limiting deliveries to work hours.

“My greatest takeaway through this venture has been the importance of understanding your users,” Cudjoe said. “Early on, we focused heavily on adding features we thought would be useful. But lacking a background in construction management, we had some misconceptions about how to market ourselves and what features to prioritize. Now, we do field research and talk to people in the space to discover how to make our app more valuable to the users.”

QuikCal has come a long way from its initial iteration, and Reilly has enjoyed having a front-row seat as a professional sounding board and mentor.

“It’s been incredibly rewarding working with Ken, Alec and Del over the last three years as they developed and refined this job site delivery management solution,” said Reilly, who is now a technology strategy manager for Skanska UK. “Although this started as a challenge for a fall semester class project, they continued to incubate the idea, collect feedback and advice from industry and tech leaders, and looked to pilot on local job sites in Durham. I was also impressed with how they continued to tap into resources at Duke to support their entrepreneurial journey.”

Lessons in Entrepreneurism

Steve McClelland, executive director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation (CFCI), was their instructor in the first-year design course and has advised the team over the years.

“Success is unpredictable, but one factor in success is persistence, and the QuikCal team keeps showing up,” McClelland said.

Kalin and his partners have demonstrated their persistence by taking advantage of many resources for entrepreneurs at Duke:

• Selected as a finalist at the Pratt School of Engineering 2022 Student Design Fair
• Received grant funding through CFCI’s BIG program and hired a student intern
• Kalin took classes through the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative and Fuqua School of Business
• Participated in pitch competitions, most recently traveling to the BuiltWorlds Infrastructure Conference in Washington—Liu pitched as one of 10 selected startups
• Participated in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which focuses on market research through potential customer interviews
• Kalin became a Melissa & Doug entrepreneur, an accelerator program providing networking and programming opportunities

“I’ve learned so much from this venture, like making a pitch deck, talking to customers, delegating with the other co-founders and scoping out what’s even possible,” Kalin said. “As an engineer, my peers and I often focus only on technical details, but it’s arguably as important to have good communication skills and be able to explain to people what you’re doing and why.”

With a little more than a semester remaining in their Duke careers, the QuikCal team is weighing their options for the future. They’re exploring more opportunities with job sites, partnerships with other software companies and raising money to expand the product.

“I tell people all the time, I don’t know if QuikCal will be a commercial success or not,” Kalin said. “Either way, it’s given me a whole new lens. Thinking about my classes as if I’m running a company has made me appreciate the opportunities at Duke a lot more.”