Customer story
Winning a $10M job without the lowest price
How the interiors division of a national contractor turned its bid period into a demonstration of competence the owner could see.
- job won against a field with cheaper bids
- $10M
- of the bid period: full set reviewed, gaps and clashes cited to their sheets
- Day one
- strategic RFIs, value engineering options, senior time with the owner
- Won on professionalism
job won against a field with cheaper bids
of the bid period: full set reviewed, gaps and clashes cited to their sheets
strategic RFIs, value engineering options, senior time with the owner
The interiors division of a national contractor ran a $10M bid through CIM from the start of the bid period. The gaps and ambiguities that usually surface in the final week surfaced in the first pass, cited to their sheets, and the team converted the best of them into RFIs during the bid period. The hours the platform gave back went into value engineering options and senior time with the owner. When prices landed, theirs wasn't the sharpest. They won anyway.
“The gaps came back cited on day one, and the hours we saved went into value engineering and time with the owner. By the time prices landed, they knew who understood their job.”
The challenge
On a competitive bid, every bidder prices from the same imperfect documents, and most of the bid period disappears into reading them. The bids that lose on price usually also lose on presence: no time left for value engineering, no senior hours left for the owner, and RFIs that ask what the documents already answer.
The solution
The team ran the full set through CIM at the start of the bid period. Discrepancies, gaps and ambiguities came back cited to their sheets in the first pass. The estimators turned the material ones into RFIs. An RFI that pinpoints a real problem in the documents does two jobs at once: it protects the price, and it shows the owner's team this bidder has read their documents more closely than anyone else pricing them.
The results
They won the job. The owner had cheaper bids in front of them and picked the team that understood the project best. The mechanism was visible all the way through the bid period: sharper questions earlier, value engineering options the owner could weigh, and senior people spending their hours across the table instead of behind a pile of drawings. Price got them into the field. The bid period, used differently, got them the job.
Modules used
- Assistant
- Drawing comparison
- Report compliance audits
- Registers