For every business decision you make, you need as many justifiable reasons to go ahead with the change as you can get. Making the decision to embrace digital seems like the fad for every business these days, but you should only get on board with a trend if you are absolutely sure it will benefit your business. As a civil contractor, you are probably aware that many of your colleagues and competitor businesses are taking their business digital. And one of the most notable areas where the shift to digital is impacting civil contractors is how estimates are done.
Of course, making the decision to embrace the latest trends and use civil estimating software is a great idea at a first glance, but just how good is it? For one, knowing the benefits of civil estimating software might influence your decision to actually make use of it. Also, knowing about the possible advantages will help you to better leverage its potentials and make use of it to the optimum. Here are some of the most prominent benefits of using civil estimating software.
Build the capability of your business
If you are looking for a way to improve how much you are able to do and how efficiently you do it, civil estimating software is one of the tools that might help you. In fact, it is one of the most efficient ways general contractors and sub-contractors can boost business performance before and during the execution stage of their projects.
Using civil estimating software will reduce how much time you have to spend on preparing a bid. Using software also reduces the stress associated with preparing estimates while cutting down on errors usually associated with the process since all your data are processed and manage on the same software that handles everything from estimation to takeoff and creation of reports.
By spending a fraction of the time that you would have spent on preparing the estimates by hand, you will be able to focus on other aspects of your business. Additionally, your bids are handled with better competence and you are able to come up with more reliable and price competitive bids without compromising profitability.
Better Project Execution
The goal of creating estimates for every project is for better and more effective project execution. This means badly prepared estimates can negatively impact the success of a project. The alternative to using single natural budget estimation software like Cubit is to make use of a combination of programs that will require you to transfer crucial data from one program to the other leaving room for an accumulation of errors in the long run.
Using civil estimating software will not only improve your accuracy and quality of your bid, but it also means your workers are less confused both in the process of preparing estimates and even in executing the project on the field. With a civil estimating software, you are more likely to trim off days that would have otherwise been spent on preparing civil estimates. Also, you will be able to standardise the quality of your work more easily.
Improved collaboration and integration
The process of preparing an estimate is typically a combination of valuable data from various departments and most times requires a collaboration of various tools and features for an overall detailed and comprehensive estimate. This means using a platform which integrates other valuable tools for preparing estimates like Microsoft Excel, Mudshark, Xero, and so on will ease your work and make the overall process more efficient. Doing this helps to reduce how much you have to replicate data and streamline your work.
Also, a comprehensive estimate involve is a combination of steps and processes. For example, preparing a digital takeoff is just as important as making a list of the costs and types of materials that will be needed to execute the project. Also, preparing a report is also very crucial. Using a tool that will combine all of these processes and simplify them will indeed transform your business.
Cut costs and time
Probably what every business owner wants to hear is how to cut costs in various aspects of a business. The process of preparing estimates can sometimes be expensive and time-consuming. Sometimes you have to contact vendors individually and receive quotes for each material, even on projects that require thousands of different materials that you must account for. Using civil estimating software breaks the monotony of some of these processes. With an estimation software, there is a central database of information which will hold important data like costs of labour, cost, and quantity of materials, and even schematics for other projects which makes it possible to make a comparison for preparing new ones more conveniently. In the long run, you will reduce how much time required sourcing for each of this information and cut cost as well. Also, by reducing guesswork to the barest minimum, you are indirectly cutting costs that could arise due to errors in estimation.
Ease of use
For something that does so much, you might expect the process of making use of a civil estimating software to be complex, but surprisingly most estimating software are easy to use. In fact, little or no specialised computer skills are required to make use of them. Of course, the system sometimes takes some getting used to. But they are mostly intuitive and relatively easy to use with a simple interface that you and your workers will find quite easy to work with.
Conclusion
Whether you have been using an entirely manual process to prepare your budgets or you have been making use of the other traditional methods, you stand to benefit a lot when you make the shift to civil software. Although results might take some time to manifest, you will most definitely see the difference and reap the benefits in the long run.
