Are you sacrificing profit on future bids? Broken production tracking might be your problem

Author:
Nicole Heger
July 27, 2020

There’s no doubt about it: construction is a competitive industry. That means being able to win projects over your competitors is essential to the health of your business. There are multiple factors that play into your bidding, such as quality work and relationships between you and general contractors and owners. To keep a competitive edge, striking the balance between finding areas to save costs without compromising quality can be tricky to achieve, all with the goal of winning the project.

How to Win the Bid, Without Sacrificing Profit Margins

So what’s the secret sauce? Productivity.

The fact is, the more productive your project teams are, the larger your profit margins will be. To truly get a pulse on what your teams are capable of doing, estimating teams need to be able to understand the rate they are using to estimate projects.

How you’re losing: Guesstimates are seen as gospel. Without accurate historical data to reference on past projects, production rates become just a subjective “best guess.” And that impacts your bottom line when it comes to schedule, budget and labor, in addition to other factors.

How to win: By building a historical database of production rates across multiple projects and crews, you can use that information to understand the projected productivity of your project teams on a given scope, which in turn allows you to be more effective on future estimates.

Among other factors, getting an edge over the competition means bidding at lower rates that you can be confident will be delivered. But historical data isn’t the only information your team needs to be successful. Once the project is underway, crews need to verify the estimate is correct in real-time, and then make adjustments quickly when problem areas arise to get back on track and make sure your company isn’t losing profit.

Intelligent Project Tracking Helps You Keep Your Competitive Edge

Why work harder when you can work smarter? In an age where AI-powered software can do the heavy lifting of cumbersome tasks, save your workforce for areas where they are most critical. You already know you’re losing money with the inaccurate, manual process of production tracking, so using tools that empower your teams to get the information they need to make the right decisions in real-time will help you get the secret sauce to productivity that outshines the competition and gets your business ahead.

When it comes to verifying payments and future job estimates, Ron Rankin, Superintendent at Southmost Drywall, Inc., spoke about the merits of SmartTrack®, StructionSite’s Intelligent Project Tracking tool that automates the production tracking process:

“With SmartTrack, we would not only be able to pay out correctly on future jobs, it would also work well with our estimating department, and we could verify future job estimates. I think the fact that we have our estimate, and then we'd have the tracking of the actual materials that we used, would allow us to verify whether the estimate was correct. I think in the future we can tweak that part to be more accurate [for future jobs].”

Ron Rankin, Superintendent at Southmost Drywall

SmartTrack automates the once labor-intensive and inaccurate process of production tracking. Each project delivers a dashboard that gives insight into a project’s progress over time, and that data is invaluable information to reference for future estimates, in addition to real-time decision-making. Since the tool is image-based, you also have images that back up your production rates with digital proof for work done on the jobsite.

In the end, having insight into your true productivity rate will allow you to more accurately bid on projects so you can both get an edge over the competition while maximizing your potential profit.

Interested in learning how SmartTrack’s automated production tracking tool can work for you? Currently, SmartTrack tracks the production of drywall and framing, with plans to incorporate other critical path scopes next.

Get in touch with our team to learn more about SmartTrack.

Latest Blog Posts

By using this site or clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Cookie Policy for more information.