Things to Consider When Bidding and How we Can Help
The bidding process is possibly the most impactful aspect of pre-construction. Whether it is residential or commercial, the magnitude of work in any project leaves room for any number of mistakes. One misplaced decimal multiplied by the quantity can crush your margin and owners are not forgiving when it comes to in-house mistakes.
In this Post-COVID-19 world, contractors are bidding on more projects than usual to counterbalance the lost revenue. Along with this action comes an unhealthy consumption of risk, but here are some ways to mitigate in your favor.
Calculation errors are the simplest to overcome. These mistakes happen, it’s human error, but the more your team makes use of the available technology, the better your chances are of avoiding them. For example, Heavy Bid estimating software carefully utilizes your historical expense data to come up with a value.
Visit the site. In person. No, Google Earth does not count. Walk the jobsite. This is also a great opportunity for the younger team members to gain exposure to the beginning elements of a project and consolidate their findings. The knowledge you take away from actually visiting the jobsite will pay you back in dividends. You may see something missed on the drawings; in which scenario you would file a Request for Information to the owner. These visits also give you a better understanding of what to consider when designing your maintenance and protection of traffic plans for the neighbors and traveling public.
Provide a deadline for material pricing. “Contractors should always include in their bids a deadline for acceptance because material suppliers tend to only guarantee pricing for a certain period of time. That’s an easy way to make sure that you don’t get stuck with pricing that is unrealistic,” stated by attorney Phillip Sampson Jr. in the Houston office of law firm Bracewell LLC. It’s vital that you stay in contact with your suppliers.
Lastly, ensuring your subcontractor proposals make sense and truly capture the scope of work intended are a large factor. Your subcontractors and subconsultants are a considerable percentage of the bid submission. We understand this because most commonly, Quadrant Engineering holds a subcontractor-entity on a project, and it is ingrained in our protocol to make sure that we know the scope and ask any questions we may have.
There certainly will be times where the subcontractors review the scope, and they will have a set of exclusions. Instead of simply putting it in writing in the proposal and/or drawings, we make sure the bid coordinator understands the exclusion and accommodates for it, so the ball is never dropped. We strive to make sure that our project team knows exactly what it is we are bringing to the table and equally important, what we are not.
The main asset that we provide to our GC partners is that Quadrant Engineering is built on a foundation of construction engineering and management, not just on design and inspection like so many other engineering firms. We understand and embrace the challenges that occur when constructing multi-million-dollar projects and many times, we identify them before they even become true problems.
When necessary, we also inquire about our own site visits. These field visits are never at any cost to our potential partners. At Quadrant, we realize the more exposure we have to the project, the more of an asset we become to the project team.
With Consideration,
R. Chowdhury