David Barbour is the Estimating Manager for akp Scotland Ltd. Having been in the industry for many years he has used a number of different estimating software systems to price all kinds of work. Within akp they work in 3 main areas: Healthcare, Refurbishment and General Contracting. They work on a lot of hospitals, fit outs of offices/shops and then general contracting that can cover anything. His department has won between 150 and 200 jobs using ConQuest estimating software with a value of between £20k and £4m each.
“I am working on a job at the moment worth about 2 million but there is no bill of quants. The library match feature in ConQuest lets me put in the client’s headings but then use my library descriptions and resources to create lots of build ups behind their headings. I can have 10 separate build ups for each item but they are hidden, when we win the job all that information is there in the background.’’
akp Scotland Ltd send 90% of their enquiries out via ConQuests’ cloud based enquiry system. David explains that in the past they have done everything manually, they have designed special CD’s with headings in for subcontractors, they have looked at other none integrated and none construction cloud based systems but he considers ConQuest to be the best: ‘’I save around 3-4 days per tender by using ConQuest On Line. If we price 150 tenders per year, this will give approximately 500 man days longer for our supply chain to price the enquiry. The number of projects we manage to tender each year has increased by about 15% since we have started using the On Line system. I like the tracking system, if subbies say they didn’t get the documents we can see if they have downloaded them, you can see who has priced the enquiry you sent or if they have priced someone else’s which is important on a lot of design and build stuff.’’
It is clear that akp have taken full advantage of the On Line module, which, ConQuest gave akp, and all of the customers running the Enquiry Management module, as a free update. We asked David if he could say anything else about his experience with ConQuest: “It’s just very stable, it doesn’t crash, I work with it at home and there are no problems whether I’m using Citrix or working locally. It is very accountable and auditable and the information is clear and concise.’’
Picture: George Watson’s College Edinburgh.