Standardizing Preconstruction and Construction Estimating

What is your job as an estimator? Not just the daily tasks that you perform to complete your deliverables, but what is the overall bigger picture that you are working toward? Is it company growth, winning more work, or helping create better buildings?

Precon is in a unique position to make a huge impact on the built environment. You are the foundation upon which better buildings are built through your decisions early in the life of the project that can minimize safety, time, cost, and qualify risks throughout the life of the project.

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What is Standardization in Preconstruction and Estimating?

Standardization is the process of forming procedures that govern the creation of a good or service in a particular industry agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders. These established standards serve to uphold consistent quality in the products or services within a particular sector, ensuring they are on par with comparable offerings.

The primary objective of standardization is to establish uniformity in industry practice while also playing a crucial role in safeguarding the safety, interoperability, and compatibility of the produced goods.

The goal to standardizing precon is to provide:

Accurate estimates faster
Better project decisions based on defendable data
Consistency
Increased collaboration between design, operations, and owners

The cornerstone of true innovation lies in effective standardization. By establishing comprehensive standards for your preconstruction department, you unlock the gateway to creativity and novel problem-solving.

Embracing diverse perspectives becomes seamless, unhampered by the burden of integrating varied tools and processes from different offices. Furthermore, this approach minimizes the risk of data errors and ensures essential information remains accessible to all stakeholders.

Beyond these advantages, it wields a profound influence on talent attraction and retention. The absence of proper training and consistent project estimation procedures can prove exasperating, even to the most skilled junior estimators. Embracing standardization, therefore, emerges as a pivotal catalyst for fostering an environment conducive to innovation and attracting top-tier talent.

What are the Benefits of Standardizing Preconstruction?

Copying and pasting formulas and clicking and dragging takeoff isn’t what makes you a good estimator. A good estimator has skills beyond just performing these routine tasks. What makes a good estimator is someone who can analyze and use cost history data, conquer challenges before they arise, and suggest ways that make buildings better while staying on budget and meeting project deadlines.

Brent Pilgrim, National Director of Preconstruction at The Beck Group, and a leader in BIM advocacy, says “I know many of you, if not all of you, give such a significant amount of our lives to this industry and to our companies in exchange for an opportunity to do something meaningful with our lives through our career.”

Since your daily job is so deliverable-driven, and without the right tools to work efficiently, it is easy to lose sight of that bigger, more meaningful picture. Brent says, “Imagine preconstruction teams no longer performing the manual process of counting widgets, assigning a cost, and evaluating disparities in estimates. Imagine, instead, that our teams are experts in statistical analysis, wizards wielding artificial intelligence, and masters of risk model simulation.”

Doing that though requires standardizing the way we do preconstruction. Introducing industry-wide standards for workflows and processes means we truly can create a better future.

The construction industry is one of the largest in the world but experiences a very low profit margin and preconstruction in particular is traditionally seen as a sunk cost department. Standardizing the preconstruction process will increase profitability for the entire industry.

The Key to Standardization

Implementing robust, centralized preconstruction software that can seamlessly perform the tasks of multiple tools is the key to standardizing preconstruction and estimating. One single source of truth eliminates data errors. This approach facilitates the implementation of standardization across the entire company streamlining operations, and empowering teams to make more informed decisions for greater success.

Kasey Bevans, Chief Information Officer at Balfour Beatty says that implementing DESTINI Estimator construction estimating software saved the company money as well as their client’s money. She says, “DESTINI Estimator gives our company, Balfour Beatty, a best-in-class estimating platform, as well as other key capabilities, such as model-based estimating, historical cost tracking, and conceptual estimating,” Kasey continues, “Having all of these capabilities rolled into one solution will improve our operational efficiencies and reduce cost by eliminating other technology investments.”

Standardization Improves Communication

One of the most common challenges preconstruction teams face is communication—more specifically, the lack of it. The lack of communication can become more than just a challenge, it can seriously impede progress in getting deliverables out the door, lead to cost overruns, and confuse and even anger owners. For GCs with multiple offices, it can get even worse.

Precon is historically notorious for working in silos and it has a damaging effect. 1/3 of construction projects that go over budget and/or are delayed are due to communication problems. However, those teams that collaborate and use integrated methods of construction are seeing how successful these collaborative approaches are. This isn’t just a trend. It’s the direction the industry is moving in.

Precon teams who bring in architects, operations, and owners all together at the same table are seeing that collaboration pays back.

Trent Isaacson, Vice President of Preconstruction at Layton Construction says though the price of a project is of course important, he wants clients to see “the way that we’re going to be successful in delivering you the best outcome is through collaboration and teamwork.”

Cloud-hosted DESTINI Estimator allows precon teams to work from anywhere and the Team Estimating feature means estimators can all be working in the same estimate at the same time. Changes to the estimate are seen in real time, so no time is wasted waiting for an estimate to be reviewed. And the integration with Microsoft Power BI allows estimators to put together easy-to-understand dashboards in a way that owners want.

Removing the communication barriers from traditional delivery methods reduces the cost of a project, reduces risk, and increases the time preconstruction teams have to focus on higher value activities.

Teaching and Training is Easier

In a market where estimators are aging out of precon and the difficulty of finding recruits who don’t want to work in the field, innovative technologies not only attract new talent to your precon team but greatly aides in training new and junior estimators faster.

Balfour Beatty found DESTINI Estimator especially helpful in providing consistency and continuity in training junior estimators. Before implementing DESTINI Estimator, junior estimators had to learn how to estimate multiple different ways because every estimator did it a little bit differently. With a standardized process and one integrated estimating solution, “learning is a lot faster,” says Landon McQuestion, Vice President of Preconstruction at Balfour Beatty.

How Does Standardization Impact Winning Bids?

Company-wide standards are important for a firm to implement consistent and recognizable output. An integrated software and a centralized database are key to creating that standard process. The estimators can use the same process when they have access to the same tools and the alignment in toolbox and method means that the estimators know the right way to work with one another. The established procedure and open communication result in fewer mistakes at a higher speed and efficiency. Consistently accurate work lends itself to a good reputation for an estimating team that can mean higher bids for a firm.

Focusing on standardizing technology will increase jobs and close the education gap to result in improved productivity. Firms that standardize their technology and their software across branches enhance internal communication and collaboration and open their potential for recruitment. A winning combination of good internal communication, easy collaboration, and reduced errors and high productivity will result in more bids.

You Have to Stop Doing What You’ve Been Doing

You might say that the way you’re doing estimates now is “standard” because half of the country’s precon teams use multiple tools to complete estimates. In Balfour Beatty’s case, they were using 11 different programs to complete estimates with each regional office doing it a different way.

Deliverables had no consistency and owners were getting confused. So, even though standard, it wasn’t standardized. Unifying their estimating efforts has made Balfour Beatty and many other general contractors faster and better at creating estimates.

Not only is standardizing preconstruction helping individual contractors, but by getting everyone on board these revolutionary precon technologies, our industry has a huge opportunity to be more profitable and build better buildings in a safer manner.

To look at how DESTINI Estimator construction estimating software and DESTINI Bid Day bid leveling software are revolutionizing and standardizing preconstruction, click the button below.

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