Construction Information Technology Blog

It’s all about getting a Bid

At some point in the preconstruction phase of a project figuring out what its cost will be and who is going to do the actual work has to be done. Whether it is Design-Build, Construction Management or a typical hard bid contract there are still a number of key activities that have to be performed to determine the cost. The list of activities includes:

• Preparing a list of Trades and Suppliers to request prices from
• Phoning, faxing or emailing out Invitations to Bid to get Trades and Suppliers working on a price
• Printing (or receiving from the Design Consultant) and distributing the drawings and specifications
• Distributing any subsequent Addenda or supplementary information
• Tracking and recording all the interactions using transmittals, waybills, logs and other records
• Receiving the bids by phone, fax, email or hardcopy
• Recording the bids and all the related details to prepare them for analysis and selection

Traditionally, each of these steps in the process has been done separately using phone, fax, email, snail mail, excel spreadsheets, paper files and a variety of other mechanisms. New technologies are enabling all of these tasks to be accomplished online. A key consideration when looking at moving these tasks online is making sure they all integrate and work well together as a seamless system. There is no point using FTP to distribute documents electronically if you have no effective audit trail to prove who had access to what information should there be a claim. You might just as well go back to preparing transmittals and waybills and distributing paper. The risk of claims and delays from having gaps in your electronic process is too high. If all of these processes are about ‘getting a bid’ then your preconstruction technology needs to enable you to actually receive the bid and know with confidence that there is no risk of costly errors or omissions related to it.