In recent years, construction software has infiltrated the construction landscape with incredible speed. Construction software allows project teams to abandon traditional hard copy documentation, virtual private networks (VPNs), and fax machines in favor of mobile devices including iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.
PROCORE BIDDING TOOL
Founded in 2003 by tech entrepreneur Tooey Courtemanche, Procore strives to help professionals collaborate on construction projects by ensuring that the right people receive the right information at the right time. Offering software solutions to manage every aspect of a project from bidding to closeout, Procore brings entire construction portfolios into the Cloud.
Starting with the bidding stage, Procore’s Bidding Tool allows organizations to solicit bids based on the bidding documents and contracts prepared in the detailed design phase of a construction project. Subcontractors can download bid packages and provide bids, which quantify their contributions to the project in terms of material quantities, productivity rates, worker hours, wage rates, material dollars, overheads, and indirect costs.
Procore also provides a comprehensive bidding history for every project and bid packet. All emails regarding a particular vendor and bid are automatically attached to the vendor record, enabling quick evaluation of key factors in order to derive the best price for a subcontract. Users can consider bids based on the total number of bidders on a project, the backlog of individual bidders, the bidding history of individual vendors, the physical location of bidders, and the speed with which a bidder is able to both respond to a bid and amend the bid based upon additional information.
Bid packets are wholly electronic and compatible with any format, including plans, specs, PDFs, and the output file types from other construction software packages, such as CAD applications or spreadsheets. Once documents are uploaded to Procore, the documents are available for inclusion in any bid package henceforth.
Procore’s Bidding Tool is designed to be easy to use so that subcontractors can respond as quickly as possible to bid solicitations. The bid list view allows a bid administrator see which vendors have submitted bids and which vendors have yet to respond. Procore also saves every bid sheet in PDF form so that vendors can print the documents and include them in their offline business.
THE COST OF REWORK
Once a bid is won, project management begins with all of its duties, including drawing management, beginning with the drawings from the bid. One of the biggest drawing management pain-points facing construction professionals not utilizing construction software is version control, contributing to an estimated $15 billion spent annually on rework, according to the Construction Industry Institute.
A large part of rework costs are directly related to the multiple drawing sets issued throughout the course of a construction project. As the architects’ original design plans undergo constant markups during the construction process, it’s essential that all involved team members have constant access to the most up-to-date version of project plans to avoid the risk of building off of outdated drawings.
When project teams must wait to receive project data, they waste valuable hours and drastically impact the project schedule—and more importantly—the budget. Procore eliminates these bottlenecks and delays by centralizing project data and mobilizing project management, giving involved parties around-the-clock access to all project documentation via the Cloud.
Aside from extensive printing costs and time consumption, the old school method of revising, updating, reprinting, and redistributing paper-based documentation is no longer a viable method of management due to the difficulty of creating, updating, and manually distributing drawings in a collaborative and efficient manner.
Companies without construction software rely on plan tables housing full-size drawings inside the jobsite trailer and smaller, outdated, half-size sets in the hands of employees spread out across the jobsite, or even in remote offices. Keeping the entire team working from the current set of plans is almost impossible with the only up-to-date set residing on the plan table inside the office that must be annotated, duplicated, and manually delivered to everyone on the team every time a change is made.
PROCORE DRAWING TOOL
Procore’s Drawing Tool organizes construction drawings into one master set and automatically names and numbers every individual sheet. Automatic version tracking prioritizes the most recent drawing set to ensure project teams never work off of outdated drawings. With this type of drawing management software, the entire change history for a drawing set is available, allowing users to see exactly what has changed across versions, as well as documentation of who made those changes, increasing transparency and accountability.
Project teams cannot only review sheets, but also mark up drawings with annotations and text comments, approve changes, and distribute updated plan sets out to the entire project team in a matter of minutes. Markup and annotation features are ideal for maximizing productivity, giving team members the ability to create private notes within drawings, and publish as-built changes to the rest of the team.
Regardless of the project management task, whether it be bidding, drawings, RFIs, submittals, punch lists, etc., accurate and up-to-date project information can be securely delivered to all project team members on any Internet-connected device with Procore construction project management software. Soon enough, the days of working with paper logs and outdated in-house servers will be only remembered as an unloved remnant of the past. ■
For More Information For more information on construction software solutions from Procore, visit www.procore.com.
Modern Contractor Solutions, October 2014
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