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Contention Over Bid Awards Erupts

As always happens, when work gets scarce people start questioning the bid awards, especially when it comes to public projects. What they start questioning too might raise some eyebrows.

The city of El Cajon, CA, wanted to build a police department and went out to bid for the project thinking it would cost $48 million. What it got was six bids all between $40 and $41 million. The news report attributed the closeness of the bids to “construction companies lowering their bids in tough economic times.” However, it just may be that the city’s estimate was just way too high, right?

Anyway, one of the bidders that was the third lowest, filed a protest claiming the winning bidder didn’t bid according to the specifications. Those specs called for the inclusion of a person to coordinate the building of a detention center inside the project and apparently that bidder knew the winner hadn’t included one, or had included more than one. The difference in bid amounts between the winning bidder, and the protesting bidder was $600,000. You have to wonder if the losing bidder actually was planning on paying that one person $600,000. But even if that were the case there would have been a tie.

It just may be though as things continue to get more challenging in the markets that we will see more contention erupting over who got what bid and why. That means careful estimating that tracks with the specs is going to be in demand.

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Choose Project and Business Success

I recently spent some time with J.F. McCarthy’s excellent book, Choosing Project Success. If ever there was a volume that speaks to the person who loves to build this is it. McCarthy covers some very in-depth information while keeping the reading task manageable. Early parts of this book take you on a journey to discover the key elements that make up the beginnings of a successful project. From there you are succinctly treated to some insightful approaches to estimating, project scheduling and the other necessary processes you go through when building. Later on, there is an immense degree of detail related to all the nuances of how a building and the components that make up the building interact with each other. You may think you know a lot about building, but you will find things here that will definitely make you stop, think and re-evaluate how you view not just the building process, but the beliefs about those things that go into those buildings. I will be doing an in-depth review to be posted on Construction Software Review in the very near future and hopefully an interview with the author right here.

Pawel Gotlib, a construction pro who is currently finishing up some construction management studies, created a tool that construction companies can use to assess their financial health, and perhaps lend some insight into things they might do to strengthen their companies. He has offered it as a free download here. You will need MS Excel to use it, and for anyone who might be curious about how their company stacks up from a financial perspective this is definitely a worthwhile tool to try out.

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Here are some interesting web tools, and one thing on the horizon, that promise to make the flow of construction project information quicker and more accurate.

If you’ve been thinking about bringing together all of your communications efforts there are some companies that are making that easier. The idea is to have all of the information about a project readily accessible to all the people who need access to that information. Construction is an especially onerous business to do that with since there are so many document variables. Still, it appears some are taming what would otherwise be a fairly tangled mess.

Projectmates is online project management software that claims to allow internal and external teams to share drawings, documents, meeting minutes, discussions, budgets, invoices and more with just a web browser. This is a seven-year old product that uses 40 different modules and is available to rent on a per-project basis, or with a dedicated server provided by them, or as an in-house solution that you purchase. From a wireless perspective it works with Blackberry, Palm and Microsoft Mobile 5.0.

Embracemobile says that recent reports claim 25 percent of construction costs can be eliminated by the efficient transfer of information. The company uses a platform that combines wireless, web and palm technology (they use that in lower case so I’m assuming they mean handheld devices in general) to enable remote workers to access and supply information in real time. The company claims you will enjoy benefits like the elimination of phone tag; having more accurate and timely data; having fluid items like reports and schedules accessible in real time; admin staff freed from data entry and sending information; and reduced travel to and from sites.

Esquiggles says you can increase productivity by 20 percent per day by incorporating remote data entry that updates things in real time. This company uses modules so you can select the level of sophistication you want. For example you could start out using an electronic data collection and client portal and later you could add the bill of materials module and others. This particular solution appears to have a very robust forms capability that includes form designing options. For creating reports and other documents the data collected can be transferred to a standard company template with the click of a button.

In the field all of these systems require at least one hand free to handle the handheld device. But a research team with the Canadian National Research Council’s Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT) is working on a way to enter data using speech. They have created a multimodal field data entry (MFDE) application to help with data collection during concrete inspections. The researchers say that if workers are are using instruments or taking measurements they can use speech to enter data or information at the same time. While background noise was somewhat of a problem the researchers have gone back to the drawing board to identify a better microphone for the application. Even with the noise issue respondents claimed they were able to complete tasks faster while at the same time being able to be more aware of their environment.

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More and more software functions continue to move online and estimating is no different. From at least one perspective this is advantageous since you are all aware of the time and cost involved with maintaining software on your computers and servers. RS Means just announced the availability of their online square-foot cost calculator so I stopped by there to get a look at how online estimating works. The company already has a complete online estimator for everyday detailed estimate creation.

I was immediately impressed with the level of detail and ease of use. When you begin you choose the type of labor, like Open Shop or Standard Union. Next you select the date of data release and this includes the most recent quarter so you know you’re working with some pretty up-to-date numbers. In subsequent steps you select your city and state, building type, wall framing types, building parameters (square feet etc) and building additives (emergency lighting, elevators, etc). You can also name the project and save details about it. The estimate totals appear in a right-hand pane and as you work through it is updated, or you can click a calculate button to see how the costs are mounting up. Finally, a separate page provides the report with each area’s percent of total cost, square foot cost and total cost. You can print this out and export it to MS Excel. Once you save the estimate it is stored under your Home Tab along with any other estimates for which you have used the calculator.

For $700 a year you get the online Construction Estimator and the online Square Foot Estimator. McGraw Hill Construction has a free square foot calculator that you need to register to use. American Dream Consulting has an online estimator that costs $19.95 per project and seems to be focused on residential. Another one that is aimed at residential is Resi-Cost and it comes in two versions, Lite and Full. This seems to be designed for homeowners who are trying to figure out how much their dreams will cost or who are going to build their own. The Lite version costs $99 per month and the Full-featured version costs $199 per month.

This probably is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to these types of online estimating efforts so if you know of others leave a comment with the URL so people can explore their options.

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