Ruhlin Gets Results with HeavyBid

The Ruhlin Company Founded: 1915 Senior Engineer: Greg Horning Division Size: $100 Million Number of Jobs Bid Annually: 48 Location: Sharon Center, OH

Last year the Heavy Civil Group at The Ruhlin Company used HeavyBid to estimate and bid 48 jobs worth almost $400,000,000 with only seven people," said Greg Horning, senior estimator with the Ohio-based company. "Those jobs were mostly structures and paving work, so they involved a lot of heavy takeoff and everything." Since Ruhlin purchased HeavyBid in 1995, the company has benefited greatly from the standardization that the program has brought to the estimating department. Everyone used something different prior to HeavyBid. "Several guys used another estimating and takeoff program, some used pencil and paper, some used Lotus or Symphony spreadsheets. Then, we would dump all that information into a spreadsheet program and crunch the numbers manually," said Horning. You can imagine the extra work that Ruhlin's old process entailed. "With HeavyBid everyone in the estimating department now has access to the same resources. For example, HeavyBid allows us to put in our wage rates for the estimate once. We can do this any time before the letting, or make other global changes to the estimate right up to the last minute. Otherwise, everyone would have to have the estimate rates right then, or you would have to go back and change everything manually. That's the kind of flexibility that HeavyBid has given us," reports Horning.

As a senior estimator, Horning's favorite feature in HeavyBid is the Bid Closing tool. "Normally on bid days with quotes coming in and everything that's happening, time is a big factor; there's a lot of tension in the air. HeavyBid allows us to make our changes, send them back into the bid, re-summarize and put the costs where they should be, then re-balance the bid based on our real costs. I think this is one of the best features of the system," said Horning.

Ruhlin recently purchased a subscription to HCSS' www.bidhistory.com service to help plug estimates. "I see that as saving a couple of hours, because a lot of times for bonding, or just to get an idea of the job value and the job breakdown, our chief estimator will say, 'here, go plug this project,'" says Horning. "With the sort and filter features on bidhistory.com, I can pull in the jobs that we've already bid and use those to get unit prices to help plug a bid. Then, all I have to do is a little editing to clean up some of the lump sum items. Using bidhistory.com, I am able to get my estimate in a quarter of the time that it took before."

Technical support was one of the most important things that Ruhlin considered when originally buying HCSS software. "The tech support has been great. When you call you always get someone in tech support. To me, that's great," states Horning. One example of HCSS' commitment to customer support is an event that occurred around 7 p.m. on the evening before a letting. Horning relates, "We were working on the bid and got some bad data. We promptly called in to tech support and the technician told us to send him our file. So we sent him the file, and within an hour, he had it repaired and back to me; we were back in business - all after normal working hours."

As a long time customer, Horning has attended the annual HCSS User's Group Meetings for the past nine years. He has actually purchased HeavyBid twice; he first purchased the system in 1992 at a company he worked for prior to joining Ruhlin. He now serves on the HCSS President's Advisory Board, where he contributes his feedback to HCSS on their current performance and future direction. "How many software companies do you know that actually listen to their customers?" asks Horning. "That's one thing that HCSS has always been great at."