Making Your Project Successful Starting with Estimates and Bids

As an owner, you may be finding it increasingly important to start your projects with the right focus and strategy, based on the increasing demands on construction companies everywhere. Data-driven technology can give you a competitive advantage, while making your construction methods more successful into the future. 

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While other factors certainly enter in, the planning phase of a project sets the stage for everything that follows – both the successes and the shortcomings. If your teams and the information they need are not connected, it’s difficult to make the most of planning. To turn that around, it’s key to limit the number of places your teams have to look for information. When you reduce manual processes and eliminate information silos, everyone can stay on the same page from the beginning of a project.

Following are two examples of how software technology can give you a competitive advantage while managing the demands on your company.

Estimates 

If your quantities are not accurate, you end up with errors during budgeting. Those budget errors can come back to haunt you, derailing your project. Creating accurate takeoffs requires accurate information transfer among stakeholders on the job. Data integration and cloud technology for document sharing are essential during the estimating process.  Companies that tracked expenses from job to job established “cost templates” they could use in estimating. But with the fast-changing state of construction we’re seeing today, those templates are bound to be outdated quickly. That can wreak havoc with your bids and result in unexpected costs, especially for labor, materials and permits. Either you’re going to cover those extra costs out of your profit, or you’re going to have an upset customer when you pass the costs along to them. It literally pays to adopt technology that can give you more precise estimates, which lead to more accurate budgets.

Bids 

Most of the time, awarding a bid has less to do with price and whole a lot more to do with finding the most appropriate vendor(s) to work on your project. One option is to manually pore over details like vendor qualifications, experience, capitalization, and reliability – plus price. It can take substantial time for a thorough comparison, but it’s important in mitigating your company’s risk. If you don’t have the time to spare in that manual process, bid management software can do the sorting and comparing of relevant details for you. 

Qualifying vendors is an indispensable way to reduce risk. If you’re like many construction owners, risk assessment and mitigation are big factors in growing and sustaining an effective business. Using software technology to pore through and sort vendor information gives you the best probability of establishing the right field of vendors to invite to bid on your projects.

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If you are interested in putting Autodesk Construction Cloud products to work in your operations, partner with Applied Software today. The experts of Applied Software can help you establish your competitive advantage and ensure your success into the future.