JHE Services recommends Causeway Estimating

Friday, 26 June 2009

“Causeway Estimating provides us with the tools to do our job faster and more accurately. It has made a real difference to our processes and the client service we can offer.” Jim Elwood, Managing Director, JHE Services

Based in the Cotswolds, JHE provides freelance estimating and planning services to the construction industry.  The majority of the company’s work is in the highly competitive, fast track retail petrol market.  Jim states: “Today’s market demands increasingly fast turnaround of tenders and the pressure is on to deliver accurate forecasts for demanding clients.  It’s common to find individual pieces of software that claim to offer estimating capability, but we found Causeway Estimating works in the same way as a traditional building estimator and we could also produce bill of quantities in SMM7 format.”

Causeway Estimating is a fast, accurate and flexible solution.  Jim continues: “A lot of our work is on term contract priced schedules and we’ve been able to duplicate the schedules on Causeway allowing us to analyse the rates. With the schedule imported into Causeway Estimating we can use the dim pad for taking off and produce fully resourced priced schedules for each contract. The benefits apply whatever the contract value and we’ve set up our own schedules of rates for small maintenance works. We receive a hand written schedule of works from site, or from the client and can quickly and easily produce a price for the client and resourced schedules for the maintenance contractor." 

Over the past four years, Causeway Estimating has proved a major advantage for their work, the majority of which is in the petrol retail market.  JHE has built up a notional bill over that time with many separate bills covering the various elements of a petrol station construction - all fully priced and quantified where appropriate. These cover elements including prelims, demolitions, sales buildings, underground tank installations, drainage, interceptors, drainage attenuation, concrete and asphalt surfacing etc. The notional bill is being added to and adjusted as standards change. 

"When we receive a new tender, it takes just a few minutes to drag and drop bills from the notional bill into the new bill of quantities for the new tender. We take off any unique items, re-dim any sections of the tender that require re-measuring, change any bill descriptions and rate build ups as appropriate to produce the final bill.  The buyer is then given the resources list to obtain prices unique to that tender.  Using Causeway Estimating we can generate subcontractor enquires and send out by email, receive the subcontractor’s price by email, carry out price comparisons and import the most competitive price direct into our tender. The final tender is then finalised by the directors, agreeing margins and discounts, at the Tender Adjudication meeting with a fully analysed and resourced tender available to them,” says Jim. 

As far as benefits are concerned JHE are able to offer a better service for their clients, with faster and more accurate quotations. The Causeway solution helps them price for a wide range of construction contracts including renovations and new build, industrial and retail unit constructions, cost planning for developers and maintenance and repair schedules. 

Jim summarises: “It took just an hour to prepare an estimate for one recent client where we set up the new tender, dragged bills into the new bill along with a copy of a similar sales building and re-dimmed some elements. Having changed the resource prices with the buyer, we then decided on profit margins and discount in “Tender Adjudication.” The contract value was around £500,000 and was awarded after our estimate was produced.”

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