Help Your Projects Stay Profitable with an Effective Handoff Strategy

As an estimator, one of the most daunting tasks is the project handoff. It’s the process of taking your awarded project and distilling down weeks if not months of project knowledge into a short face-to-face handoff meeting between the Estimator and Project Management team.

We want to make sure that our project gets off on the right foot and this requires information to be broken out in a way the Project Management team can easily consume and disseminate to their field teams. It takes disciplined and effective project and field management to keep a well-estimated project on budget and profitable.

Every estimator has a horror story or two where the field team ended up with the wrong set of drawings and dug into the profits of a job by installing items in the wrong place. Unfortunately, most project managers are working with huge spreadsheets where the data is siloed and start most projects off with days of duplicate data entry, forcing them to focus on admin tasks instead of critical path items. Couple that with managing multiple simultaneous projects and it’s easy to see how mistakes can happen during handoff.

In 2018 there was $500 billion lost to rework and 52% was due to miscommunication between the office and field.

Now we aren’t talking about small mistakes either. In fact in 2018, estimated rework cost over $500 billion with 52% of that rework caused by poor project data and communication according to the 2018 FMI Report. Much of this was lost data between estimating and the field due to over-complicated processes for passing preconstruction information to the construction teams. And with profit margins in the low teens on most projects, contractors cannot afford to have too many miscommunications on projects that cause lost revenue.

But it doesn’t have to be this way….

With Procore’s new integrated estimating and financials it’s easier than ever before to move a project from estimating to construction. With the ability to quickly set up cost controls to measure and manage expenses against your estimated budget, while also measuring labor productivity against estimated productivity.

With the click of a button, your estimated expenses create a trackable budget broken out by cost code and cost type with tools to track expenses effectively over the course of the project, and log time in the field. And the most up to date drawings, specifications and corresponding documents like shop drawings, bill of materials, and submittals synced to ensure your field team is building from the correct set of drawings and materials.

Additionally, we can set up your schedule of values and purchase orders automatically to streamline the invoicing process and produce everything needed to get started without entering data twice. This allows your team to focus where it matters most — critical path items, scheduling, labor and material constraints and coordinating with the general contractor.

Leverage estimated productivity to set daily output goals with your field team

In addition to providing a smooth handoff for project teams, there’s the added benefit of having productivity data in the same system used to build the estimate. Imagine having your estimated labor productivity available for your field teams to use as a baseline for measuring weekly performance and making course corrections where necessary.

Capture and track historical productivity data to improve your estimating capabilities on future projects

As well as being able to capture productivity overruns, how about being able to shape your future estimates? You can do this with Procore, using actuals collected in aggregate across your entire project portfolio, improving your estimating capabilities as you go along with every project. By capturing productivity with our field tracking and timesheets, you can see historical performance and measure those against similar jobs based on actual productivity rates.

To take that a step further, Procore Estimating provides analytics from similar projects based on actual construction costs, so that you can quickly provide rough order of magnitude estimates based on project type and locations, eliminating the need to estimate early revisions from scratch.

With integrated estimating and financials in the cloud, you can easily collaborate and compare your current bid against similar projects to ensure there isn’t too big of a variance from one project to the next.

If you would like to learn more about how Procore streamlines takeoff, estimating and project turn-over sign up for a live demonstration today.