Posted: Mar 22, 2022
Established as a general contractor in 1980 with office across Canada, our client is one of North America’s most collaborative and innovative commercial builders. Their vision is to build a company that leads change in the Canadian construction industry and prioritize the balance of both profits and people.
Challenge
60% of the opportunities in which the company bid are publicly tendered, requiring their estimating and business development teams to visit over 50 different tender sites per week. Their teams review potential opportunities and evaluate the best fit, which can be extremely time consuming and not an effective use of resources.
The goals of our client were simple:
- to reduce time spent on opportunity tracking;
- enable better accuracy in sourcing jobs;
- ensure no public opportunities were missed; and
- to utilize historical data for future bids.
To reach their goals, our client examined their current process and wanted to explore a more efficient way to identify and evaluate opportunities. They began a three-month trail of the Procurement Data Analytics (PDA) Dashboard to see the potential benefits of the tool. The results were outstanding. Here is what they found…
“Within the first few days of our trial, I knew our company would be procuring a license for the Procurement Data Analytics Dashboard. I could tell right away, without seeing the final data, that this system would save us time and money, while providing us with a sense of comfort that no opportunities would be overlooked.”
Strategy
The Procurement Data Analytics Dashboard has improved our client’s opportunity review process in three central areas:
Time Savings
In order to determine the time savings of this new approach, our client tracked the time it took to review websites manually compared to the PDA Dashboard. After tracking for 30 working days, they found the following:
- The average total daily time spent by 13 employees reviewing sites was 71.5 min/day
- The average total daily time spent by 1 employee utilizing the PDA dashboard was 6.5 min/day
This equates to over 60 minutes of time saved on a daily basis and 32.5 hours saved monthly. When this data is extrapolated across a full year, with the assumption of 250 working days, the annual time savings is 270 hours. At a fully loaded rate of $50/hour for staff, this equates to a yearly savings of $13,500. With the license for the PDA dashboard being $150/month, the monthly license cost is paid for within 3 days.
Accuracy
Repeatable, tedious, manual work is susceptible to significant errors. Our client wanted to avoid the possibility of missing opportunities due to human error. During the 3 month trial, their main goal was to test and confirm the accuracy the PDA Dashboard. Every day they tracked any discrepancies between projects found by the PDA Dashboard vs. the old manual review process. The total number of opportunities the tool was able to review over the 30-day period was 1,755 which equates to an average of 58.5/day. Over that period, the PDA Dashboard found an additional 24 projects of interest that would otherwise have been missed by the manual check. In their industry, 24 missed opportunities in 1 month could equate to millions of dollars in revenue overlooked. Conversely, the manual review only found one project that wasn’t picked up by the PDA dashboard, which was due to a naming filter that didn’t match up and was immediately fixed.
As the numbers demonstrate, the PDA dashboard is far more reliable and accurate at identifying projects of interest. Not only did it catch a number of projects that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks, it didn’t miss any projects identified by the administrative team.
Competitive Advantage
Once our client identified all the viable projects of interest, they were able to further utilize the PDA Dashboard to identify what other companies were likely to bid on the opportunities of interest using the historical bid results by Project Owner and the recent bids associated with potential competitors. The PDA Dashboard quickly provides a high-level comparison of the competitive landscape using historical results as a benchmark for decision making regarding estimating within the company nationwide. This information better informed their bidding strategy and ensured their resources were allocated to highly probable opportunities.
“What I enjoyed most about working with the Pontem team was the responsiveness to look into issues and provide solutions in a timely manner. It was extremely refreshing to work with a company run by real people, looking to work with us on a personal basis and provide value to our business.”
Results
The Procurement Data Analytics Dashboard provided our client with a tool that saved them time, increased accuracy and provided competitive intelligence during their opportunity evaluations. The results were that employees had more time to spend on non-manual tasks that cannot be automated, such as planning and client communication, they were provided a sense of comfort that no opportunities of interest were being missed, and they have better market intelligence in a very competitive market.
If your company is participating in public bidding and the above benefits sound attractive, please reach out to Pontem Innovations at [email protected] or visit our website Procurement Data Analytics : Pontem Innovations to learn more.
Start Now. Start With Pontem.
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