Construction Procurement Software is a hot topic in the construction industry, but what makes it the talk of the town? Why are people emphasizing the usage of procurement software to such an extent? Let’s find out in this post why construction procurement management software is necessary for your company and how it will help.
People enter the construction industry with only two goals: building things and making money. They push the limits to excel in the earlier one, but what about the profits? Have you ever questioned why a construction project comes to life as imagined when building, but the intended profit is not always met? The reason might be the choice of the wrong subcontractor or the purchase of materials at a higher rate due to fragmented bid processes.
One of the most important components in the success of a construction company is tender management. The name of your business, the project, valuable time, and money depend on the bid accepted for the project. Construction projects involve third parties, which makes the bid management process intricate and highly calculated. Each tender management procedure has several sub-processes, such as contractor classification, invitation, bid evaluation, evaluation of bidder profiles, and many others. The evaluation of each bid and the bidder profile takes a lot of time when handled manually. Additionally, there is a higher potential of errors and malfunctions, which could lead to a needless loss of money and effort. However, procurement software allows you to save on this; all you must do is equip your business with construction procurement software to give yourself an advantage over the competition on bid day.
You stand to gain greatly from a good bid strategy. The bid solicitation procedure has developed with the times and has become more efficient. The best bids aren’t necessarily the cheapest; rather, they’re the ones that set up the right tone for your project. Additionally, your bids combined decide the fundamental tone of your business and the right construction bid software helps you ease up the tasks and set a good tone for your business.
A construction company manages a variety of documents at any given time, and each project needs a significant volume of paperwork from various suppliers and partners. For instance, if you wish to issue a tender for a substantial building construction project, you will need external input from vendors like architects, lawyers, etc. Documents are typically exchanged through the mail or various file-sharing websites; manually managing these records could be laborious and result in data breaches. However, you can handle these documents in a flow easily using our construction bid management software, which comes with a document management feature.
In addition, you can limit access to confidential data and boost security by integrating several levels of access rights. This would make the process safe and transparent and aid in developing dependable relationships with your vendors and stakeholders.
The approval of the winning bid brings the bidding process to a finish, but the approval procedure itself requires more work. When approving a proposal, there are several factors to examine, especially for larger projects. Most large projects include intricate calculations, making it challenging for senior management and the legal team to review and give their approval. These manual procedures cause a delay in the project’s approval, which ultimately costs money and time.
Although, with our bid software for construction, this approval process is done smoothly and transparently within bound timelines. Our procurement software’s smart evaluation process allows the evaluators to rate the sent bids based on key factors and choose the most suitable vendor with joint ratings of all evaluators. Furthermore, the access permissions of our procurement software for construction take care of the integrity of the project bid and the bidder. Hence helping firms to make prompt, wiser decisions that involve fewer risks.
It is a necessary and time-consuming task to issue tenders and invite bids. You must complete a ton of paperwork and figure out all your requirements. After that, you should be able to decide which candidates to bid on; nevertheless, choosing which subcontractors are needed for a specific sort of work might be difficult.
Finding the subcontractors connected to the job area by switching between spreadsheets and other software could take hours of labor and still lead to leaving out the crucial ones. While automating the bid management, you can complete the entire procedure in a few clicks. With the help of our construction bid software, you can use custom fields to filter a list of hundreds of subcontractors. Furthermore, it takes no time to send them ITBs and exchange ideas and specs.
Only efficient communication can lead to effective collaboration, and this is particularly true in the construction industry. Effective communication is still a major issue in projects involving outside stakeholders. It is essential to provide the contractors with exact project information (RFQ) as soon as possible. Any misunderstandings resulting from poor communication could be quite costly for you eventually. This makes collaboration less effective and seriously harms all the connections and collaborations.
With good procurement software, general contractors like you can easily communicate information and plan with all the bidders. The bidders can ask questions about the project using our construction bid software, and you can answer them whenever you like. For instance, you could give the bidders a certain amount of time to ask questions about the project (generate RFI). After that time has passed, you’ll receive a list of all the questions, and you can then opt to respond to them within a day or two or the specified period. This will enable you to avoid any misunderstandings and pointless question-prompting during the bidding process. In addition, to save you time, our contractor procurement software will also make the process more efficient and ensure that there are no irregularities.
It is always preferable to pre-qualify subcontractors before distributing an RFP to them. Sending ITBs to only people who might be able to respond to your proposal request would be beneficial; otherwise, you’d be juggling between pointless bids and run the risk of missing the best one.
With the proper construction bid management software, you would not only be able to prequalify the subcontractors based on industry-standard preconstruction forms or customized forms, but you could also filter out the list of subcontractors based on custom fields. This will provide you with a list of the top subcontractors who could meet your needs, saving you a ton of time.
Even more, contractor bid software will help you with a wider network of subcontractors, which might be helpful for your future projects and provide you with the chance to contact businesses you might not otherwise know about. This would enable you to save even more time and work on your forthcoming tasks.
The prospect of following up with the subcontractors after the tender has been published may be the biggest nightmare of a general contractor. It is usually one of the most laborious chores because it requires many phone calls and delays that cannot be avoided. Confirming that they received the proposed deal and learning whether they will give the quote on schedule is essential.
Our bid software for construction makes this time-consuming activity easier because it lets you know if the subcontractors have received and downloaded the trade package and whether they will be supplying quotes. Additionally, it gives a portal for them to send the quote. Furthermore, you can easily check the Vendor site to see if the bidder has filed all necessary paperwork, and if not, you can automate an email to do the same.
One of the main problems with conventional tendering procedures is document storage. When stakeholders in a project are dispersed beyond national lines, it becomes rather challenging to store and retrieve a vast amount of data.
Our contractor procurement management software is based on SharePoint and comes with a larger document storage ability. Additionally, cloud storage allows you to access the document at any time and from any location on the globe. Moreover, as SharePoint is GDPR compliant, document security is always guaranteed.
Instead of investing time and energy in using emails to handle the bidding process, the construction sector already has a lot of things to worry about. It’s time to step up your bidding game and invest money in good construction bid management software that takes care of all your needs from bid preparation to bid awarding and saves you time and money.
So why are you still waiting? Request a demo of our construction procurement software, and we’d be happy to help you find the best-customized contractor bid software to fit your company’s branding.
