In today’s tough economic market, contractors must bid more work to win more work. Instead of 10 to 20 contractors, 50 to 100 are now bidding on a single job. As competition increases, the likelihood of winning decreases, and the winning bid often has little to no profit margin.
Construction companies must evaluate their bidding processes to make sure they are creating bids efficiently while ensuring accuracy, minimizing costly mistakes, managing change orders and controlling financial performance on their projects. Contractors must integrate processes from bidding through execution to win work that’s worth the effort.
Construction software helps speed up takeoff, create accurate bids, manage projects through completion and improve job cost accounting to monitor productivity and help improve profitability.
Setting the Foundation
Start improving the building process with the first step: takeoff. By using a digital takeoff solution, contractors can more precisely calculate areas, lengths and quantities, as well as eliminate the hassle and cost of working with bulky paper blueprints. Contractors also can download, scan or upload plans; easily choose cost items or assemblies; create complete estimates and graphical takeoffs; and quickly adjust and compare plans when changes occur.
Additionally, this technology can help contractors better manage changes during job execution. Estimators can establish a baseline for a takeoff and, when changes occur, can quickly identify them on a revised drawing.
Using digital takeoff technology, contractors can see changes highlighted automatically with an overlay feature, instead of manually comparing drawings. In addition, contractors can compare the as-built drawings to what’s happening onsite and realize site condition variances that influenced changes.
Without these capabilities, contractors must either trust the annotations made by the general contractor or engineers, or they must try to identify all of the changes on bid day in an extremely short time period, which could result in costly errors or losing the job.
Ultimately, digital takeoff technology speaks to what matters most to contractors when bidding and executing a job: quickly and accurately creating estimates and preventing cost overruns.
Keeping It Under Control
Integrated construction software connects the estimate to what’s happening on the jobsite. Contractors must understand exactly how each project is performing in terms of costs, projected costs and schedule. Late news of performance shortfalls can doom a project to failure without time or financing for corrective action. By using software that helps improve accuratecost tracking, contractors can capture issues early and more easily identify change orders.
To optimally execute a job, project managers must have instant access to all project documents, such as RFIs, submittals, transmittals and contracts.
The Road to Profitability
Because project managers must work closely with the accounting team to ensure projects stay on target financially, job cost tracking should be a focal point for managing jobs. Effectively managing change orders, budgets and cash flow can make or break a project.
Changes are inevitable, so contractors must use software to automate their processes to issue and track change orders against purchase orders and subcontracts.
With construction software, not only can contractors better manage their cash flow on a daily basis and eliminate project overruns, but they also have the real-time cash flow information necessary to secure bonding. By getting a better handle on their work-in-progress, contractors show they have the bonding capacity and financial responsibility for future jobs.
Bringing It All Together
An integrated construction software solution enables timely and efficient communication among estimating, job cost accounting and project management teams. It provides seamless integration of data across all business areas, which improves productivity throughout the business as well as gives owners critical visibility into all processes.
In a market that requires frequent and accurate bidding for survival, the right technology solution can give contractors a competitive edge.
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Friday, September 3, 2010