A digital bid board facilitates tracking and managing building contractors and contracts for a quick and precise response. It organises all information in one place and lets the teams review and decide on the contracts they want to target.
For most building contractors’ jobs, effective management of the bid pipeline is key to identifying the right opportunities to bid, efficiently managing the process of submitting a tender, and ultimately winning the contracts.
Contractors use various methods for invitations of bids and sourcing bid opportunities. Many still rely on traditional word of mouth and networking for sourcing bids. Some use excels sheets, whiteboards, and email calendars to manage bid submissions. In India’s fragmented construction industry, these solutions are better than nothing. They often lead to duplication of work by the estimating team, missing bid dates, and working on out-of-date information and project documents.
Even with a cloud-based solution such as drive or live chat messenger, managing bids can quickly waste hours on manual data entry. Bid coordinators and estimators can miss out on an online bid board’s feature. A building contractor can reap many benefits by using a purpose-built digital bid board to track and manage your bid pipeline.
Benefits of digital bid board
Let us find out some of the benefits that your estimating teams can gain from using a purpose-built digital bid board to track and manage your bid pipeline.
A digital bid board offers quick and clear response time across teams with advantages such as
a. All documents at one place
b. Effective collaboration on bids
c. Minimal manual entry
d. Efficient workflows
e. Latest information
f. Focus on right projects
All documents in one place
When estimators use spreadsheets or whiteboards for bidding, they have to rummage through data silos. They constantly refer to emails for updates, bid specifications, plan sets, and project documents. This back and forth on multiple application wastes a lot of time.
On the other hand, an online bid board provides access to all your notes, documents, upcoming events, and bid dates in one place. You achieve visibility of current and past bids, customer timelines, due dates, team workloads, contract values, and win/loss outcomes.
Better Collaboration on Bids
Effectively collaborating and working with the entire team is essential for your project. The centralized bid system allows teams working on the bid pipeline to share notes, assign work, communicate, and understand customer requirements and bid expectations. The software notifies all the users of upcoming tasks and bid dates. The online bid system builds stronger collaborations wherein the team can review and decide on bid opportunities to pick and pursue.
Eliminate Hours of Manual Entry
Manual entering of bids is a tedious process. Copying, pasting, or erasing and updating all the new information is prone to errors and is a lot of lost time.
With a digital bid board, you can forward all the bid invite details received on the email directly to the board. The board will automatically add them to the bid board along with all your project documents that too automatically formatted. Building contractors can instantly update the board on their intent to bid without making phone calls or sending emails, saving time for bidding and winning contracts.
Create Efficient Workflows
A digital bid board allows contractors to create customized bid workflows. The user gets a clear picture of new bids, bids under review, those they want to pursue, and those they have won. In addition, you can select and sort projects and archive or delete them, allowing a better view of work in progress.
The Most Up-To-Date Info
While manually updating whiteboards and spreadsheets, there are huge chances of missing important data or opportunities, or the information may have become redundant. A bid board adds all information in real-time, enabling you to stay on top. Access to the latest on the project, whether a new addendum with updated project documents, a change in estimator or bid status, or a new bid date or pre-bid meeting date, helps you make informed decisions.
Focus on the Right Projects
A digital bid board gives you a clear view of those projects you can easily win, those you have bid on, and those you have won. Once you know this, calculating and tracking your bid-hit ratio is effortless. With this ratio, building contractors can work on prioritising and targeting projects that they have a high chance of winning.
With a digital bid board, the teams can set the preferences criteria for selecting the contract to focus on, including service area, trades, project value, and building use. And that is not just for one bid. The board gives access to the entire portfolio of completed projects, existing works, and all project-related documents in one place. Having all bid details in one place makes it easier for building contractors to speed up and not miss any profitable opportunity.
