Panel discussion: Maximizing opportunities from IIJA funding

Afternoon, everyone. My name is Alex Citri. I'm the chief estimator of the ruling company out of the Northeast Ohio area. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Greg Strzalka. I'm area manager at the Wawback Group, specifically, Peter Dolan. We're asphalt baiting specialist in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. Alright. Welcome, everybody. My name is Aaron Alshouse. I'm the technical product manager for Heavy Bid. Hello, everybody. My name is Paul Lambert, and I'm the technical product manager for preconstruction. Alright. So for anybody who who is new to HDSS or who is not familiar with our products, basically, we're we're a a full suite company. We do everything from the preconstruction side all the way through the the job tracking side. You'll see, in the little graph that fits up here. We handle a little bit of everything. We handle everything from things in the office environment, which is where preconstruction, heavy bid, come into play, things for the job site, heavy jobs, safety, plans, documentation, and every and up into the the shop where our our fueler plus, our equipment three sixty, and our dispatcher software, really come into play. And, basically, through through the course of all of that, we can handle all of all of your needs from a from a construction standpoint and get all that information to and from your accounting system, with minimal effort. The the objective for for today is basically just to to give some insights from from our industry leaders. That's, that's where Alex and Greg are gonna come into play. And then we're gonna talk about some effective strategies. Basically, how how are you going to navigate the the ever changing landscape in construction, talk about some helpful tips, on how to increase your output utilizing HCSS products, as well as in general, and then, just a a few actual stories of putting putting those strategies and tips to use. So we wanna open up the the webinar with just a a simple poll question, and that is, how the IIJ bill j JA bill, has impacted your company. So go ahead, choose as many options as as you deem appropriate. We'll end the poll here in just a minute. Are y'all able to see those results there? So it should show that, some of y'all said that there's no change there. Others have said that, you know, you're bidding on more projects, investing more in training, and, building more relationships with federal, state, and local agencies. In case anyone didn't see it beforehand, you can you should be able to see the results of the poll. We're gonna go ahead and, move on here to to our next section. Okay. So how how do we use technology to assess what projects we're looking at? So precon that is available, allows us to kinda keep a track of what's been awarded so far, what our current bid list is, and our future workload for what we see coming up in the future. All of it is and the way as we get through the webinar here is keeping everything in one source so you're not jumping between different platforms. And Prebid helps us organize that and keep everything, organized so you're not jumping off size spreadsheets or notes someone has taken. It's between that and the automation with heavy bid with different import templates, it's kinda keeps us more efficient and more accurate as we're making our way through the bidding process with all the work coming out to be able to put out, more estimates in a less amount of time. Greg, if you wanna expand on how you're using it. Yeah, Alex. I think, yeah, we've pretty kind of nailed it. It's taken a lot of the redundancy and side spreadsheets out of our assessing project bids and the whole bidding process. It's kind of become a hub for us to not only for estimators, but, you know, support staff that's ordering bonds, request for quotes. Basically, we'll be able to house everything in one spot. It's make things a lot cleaner and definitely have been able to make, us more efficient as a company as there are more bids out there. Additionally, you know, kinda going over the heavy bid side, you know, using imports for DOT and missed pull items. I mean, that's a bunch of data entry that's now been eliminated where we can just pop those things in there instead of having somebody sit there for twenty, thirty minutes trying to input those things. And, additionally, with that kind of using plug prices, just to quickly determine if this is a job that we should be looking at as a internal contractor, or is it a job that we're gonna be a subcontractor on being able to do that more quickly and more effectively lets us select our projects so we're not wasting our time in the, in the forward part of the bidding process. Just to share some times when the the preconstruction process boosted revenue, prevented losses. Kind of like I said before, there's been more large DOT projects that have had uncertainty about what scope of work will carry a job. You know, we work in several different states, and each state has a different percentage where that general contractor has to be self performing the work. And being able to use heavy bid to determine those estimates more accurately and save us time, and not only on the front end, but also bid day where we don't run-in a situation of, you know, crap. We don't have thirty percent. We don't have fifty percent. You know, we gotta back out of this thing, which just leads to a lot of waste of time and resources on our estimators and keeps us focused on the right opportunities. And additionally using precon, it helps us keep a historical record of bid results and easily store bid tabs in there now too so we can go back and quickly access those. That's something in the past where we've kinda had it off to the side in its own spreadsheet or its own email. And having it in pre con, I can go back two, three years now, pop those open, and assess what happened before. Additionally, you know, we can kinda see where our competition is when it comes to maybe certain markets, engineers, regionals, and see if, you know, they're really aggressive in some areas versus not. But, traditionally, it's been more of a process estimators have always kinda had in their heads, but now it's something we can actually create a graph or create a sheet where it says, hey. Yeah. This this really is something that has quantifiable data behind it now. Yeah. And kind of building off that, like Greg said, being the real time data, we're all estimators. We're feature habit. You know, we like facts. And the what precon allows us to do, and, Aaron's gonna show it or Paul is gonna show you here in a second, these KPIs that are integrated within the precon system, these are actually linked to all the estimates that you're putting together in HeavyBid. And if you're using all the tools available to you, you can filter these out by different work types, different owners, different designers, and kinda get a range on where you need to be, one, to be the apparent low on the project or, you know, if you're gonna be profitable or not. We use this all the time, kinda looking between DOT projects or, work we do at public universities, you know, to kinda see where where we've been successful in awarding the job based on our markups and key performance indicators. And there's sometimes, you know, you're able to take advantage of that if all the numbers end up that you're might be able to squeeze another percentage point or two out. It's definitely something that everyone wants to take advantage of compared to your competition. Yeah. To, give a quick run through on what Alex and Greg were talking about and the the screenshot that you can see on there, let me go ahead and show what that looks like inside Precon itself. Share here. It took away my window. Are you guys able to to see the preconfig screen? Awesome. Okay. So inside your, standard preconfig, the home page here on project list, over on this left hand side under estimate insights, we can choose from our list of all estimates or synced or archived if we wanna narrow that down a little bit and find the estimate that we want to compare to all the other ones. So up here, I'm going to just select my estimate from the list. In this case, we'll use the standard one earth. And over on this left hand side, we have a couple different reporting options, but we're going to specifically look at key indicators here. With the key indicators, we're able to compare the, metrics that we have from this estimate against all the other estimates that we want. One thing to take note of at the top up here, we wanna switch in this case, I wanna compare it to both active, synced and archived. So I'm going to switch this over to all estimates. And you can see here is the list of all the estimates I'm comparing this one against. Now this is just a a demo company. So in this case, we only have sixteen. But if I had a list of several hundred or something in here, I could then go in and add in different filters and say I only wanna compare it to others from the same project owner or only ones where the bid date was in the past two years, or only ones with specific types of work as we were mentioning earlier so that I can compare it to estimates that make sense for that comparison to similar estimates. As I go in and expand each of these, we're able to see some of the comparisons that are preloaded in here, so things like the base labor as a percentage of total labor, and it's going to compare the, value that we have here versus all the other ones on this list. So we can see in this case, this is in the or sorry. The normal range is between seventy four and ninety one percent of that base labor to total labor. And this one is a little bit below that. We're at sixty six percent instead of that seventy four to ninety one. Now for this particular estimate, I may have known this was going to be low. Maybe my base labor, I expected to be low on this one because of different circumstances than some of the other estimates that I have. But it's a a quick little way to quickly check against those other estimates and make sure that at least the things that are outside of that normal range, that you're expecting them to be outside that normal range. And in fact, we even show on this graph. I don't know how, how well you're able to see it, but you can go in and do this on your own estimates. We give you what that normal range looks like, and then you can see this one is slightly out. And we have a couple different sections for that. So we have, equipment, labor, materials, all the different ones here. So this is a quick way to, at a glance, see, how many things are outside of the range that we would normally expect. In this case, I have twelve inside and thirty three that are a little bit outside, but not way outside yet. So this is like I said, you can filter this down and get the exact list that you're looking for, to be able to make that comparison, but it gives a a quick little, gut check on that to make sure that things are where you expect them to be based on the situation for this particular estimate that you're comparing. If you have any questions about that, feel free to drop it into the q and a, or, we can address it at the end as well. Okay. Next one here, question we are presented with, how does your team leverage technology stand out in bidding? The first two bullet points there, and it's kinda showing there on the bottom left, is the use of history coming in from heavy job, get real time real time information back from the field, based on the description of work for that activity or, the codebooks being used properly, getting real time data back along, with company history for as long as you've had it. That production plant or that products product Sorry. The production plan right there allows you to pull in history current, and, also, you can backlog your jobs too if you haven't had a chance to, get on with heavy job yet. So it's giving you real time data that you can be more accurate with and feel more confident in your bid as you're presented to your senior management staff that, yes, we are bidding a lot of work, but I also know that my costs are covered, and I feel comfortable with the markup that's on it through the key indicators. Again, kinda keeping everything in one platform, and keeping everything organized. And Greg will touch on how, using precon kinda helps with that as well. Yep. Thanks, Alex. I think we kinda stand out with how we streamline our bidding processes. It seems more and more apparent that local municipalities will start putting their projects out around larger DOT lettings. I don't know if they feel like they're gonna get better pricing that way, but we have very seasonal peaks and valleys of estimating loads. And when those come out, I know our estimators are all ready for the chaos because, you know, we are organized and more streamlined. The historical bid and production rates are very easily available between all the HTSS programs. And then we can merge those into new estimates, so we're not doing a lot of redundancy of you know, if we have a very similar job, we're looking to get out of the similar scope of work. We can we can replicate that into a new bid quite quickly and easily. And there's no more searching through the old resources than trying to figure out where we were in the past. You know, I kinda said bid tabs before. You know, those are right where we need them when kind of the heat of moment is, is getting hot. And then using preconstruction, you know, as we have a lot of bids going around, we're can efficiently track our bid preparation, you know, whether it's ordering bid bonds, making sure we have signature pages. You know, kind of the stuff that was kind of tracked on this side again is all kinda housed in one spot, and we have a checklist set up to make sure those are being, being executed properly. And for the most part, it's just making sure the excess of this is not there anymore. We the side tracking of it all, the bid process is smooth, and it could be tracked in one housing and precon, and that's kinda helped us out immensely. You're not opening up different spreadsheets to see what's going on here, what's going on there. And I think the continued use and development of precon is only gonna make us better and more efficient as we move forward. Alright. We're we should, have a new poll question up for you. It says, basically, has your bid output increased in the last few years? It's just a a general we wanna see if, you are are bidding on the increased number of projects that are out out in the wild right now. Alright. Looks like looks like the majority of of y'all voted yes, but it was not because of the IIJA funding. So that's good to know. So the HSS team, they kinda asked us how has your team increased bid output? Using precon, I actually looked this up for in about two seconds because when we were asked the question, I didn't know if we actually had increased it, but it's actually fourteen percent up over twenty twenty three. And I was able to kinda pull that data literally within two minutes right before this webinar just to show that, hey. Yeah. It has gone up. As I said before, we we do manage seasonal peaks and valley valleys in estimating being a cold weather state. The recent federal funding increases and actually more so this, it's savings from inflation decreases that have created new opportunities for, our estimating teams. And as DOT trends, they're kinda putting out larger projects, you know, outside your typical mill and overlays there from box culverts in there or they're doing a lot more ancillary work on top of these projects. So So there's more subcontracting work that's being involved with them. So with these large DOT bids, we're now putting two or three estimators on them along with myself kind of overseeing everything. You know, they'll be crunching numbers, inputting sub contractors. They are verifying DBE percentages, and that has really given us an advantage over our previous kinda legacy bid system. And it's just allowed a lot of people to be working in one estimate at one time to verify that. One, we have everything we need. Two, we're making sure that we have everything prepared, and we're meeting our DBE percentages. I'm sure Alex has very similar feedback as well. Yeah. We I did the same thing as soon as this question came out. Kinda looked at our last couple years here, and we're, up fourteen percent actually is where ours was, from two years. And over the last five years, we've actually increased to thirty percent. And, again, building on what you said, Greg, it's all, with keeping everything in house on one operating system with HTSS and what they're providing. The use of the production history that we talked about a couple slides ago is allowing, my estimators that might not be too versed, you know, in same bridges if they're more of a roadway person, being able to grab that real time data for bridge work and be able to put a competent estimate together. And it's allowing us to go after some of the smaller ones, but also if some of our senior estimators are busy letting our younger guys kinda take the rein on stuff because the data is there. And through the use of precon and looking at those key indicators, it lets us know if something's off and something we can adjust to and act quickly and give more confidence in what we're putting out, even at the higher volume. And that kinda builds on, this right here for competitive advantage. The reports and insights that we've talks touched on a couple times here allows us to adjust markup accordingly, with situations we say with different owners, different work types, seeing where we can be successful, where our markup is, and it's actually helped us, you know, increase margin on certain projects. But it's also allowed us to pull the reins back if we thought a job was worth more, but we realized we can't be successful in this market or that work type. One of the cool things too, if you're using pre con in the key indicators sure a lot of people have custom key indicators. That screen that Paul showed, you can actually upload your company's custom ones in there if you don't like the templates that are provided. But it kinda helps you gauge and just be more comfortable with what you guys are putting out. I mean, there's a lot of work out there, and everyone's trying to get a piece of it and, trying to keep up and being more comfortable with what's coming out. I think Greg can expand on that a little bit. Yeah. Absolutely. Out of everything Alex and I have gone over has been an advantage. It's a historical data. It's it's the elimination of redundancy. The little processes that used to take twenty, thirty minutes are gone. That just helps everybody in the long run. It's it's maximizing what we're doing on a daily basis. You know, other contractors, subcontractors, they often note how well our estimators are at handling the bid day chaos. You know, everyone's working on, depending on your state, fifty bids, two hundred bids. You know? It could be a lot. And being able to be in the forefront and be more prepared from other people has given us a competitive advantage for sure. And much of that's due to kind of the estimating hub that have you been in pre con has offered us. At this time, we wanna open up the floor to to any questions anybody might have about anything that happened in the in the webinar or any questions, you wanna ask in general. We'll go ahead. We'll hang around for a few minutes and and let those questions come on in. Hey. It looks like one question came in and that is, has the IIJ directly impacted your business? Alex, Greg, do you wanna take a stab at that? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. It has directly affected for sure. Obviously, there's been more DOT projects, to to take a look at. I can't say it's, you know, increased our workload overall. It's more of, given the funding in different states, kind of kept everything more buoyant. You know, having that transportation funding and know it's coming and know it's sustainable has been able to allow us to make decisions and know where we're growing and know where, you know, our future kinda lies. Yeah. Same. I mean, we haven't seen a huge, huge impact, but it's definitely there. Some of these municipalities are getting some, some of that funding and teaming up with DOTs on an LPA process. And Jasmine is sitting on the shelf for three or four years. They're finally able to get the funding and pushing those out and becoming available. So seen it a little bit. Obviously, always want more, but it's definitely had a little bit of an impact on us. Okay. So the next question that came in is, most of the discussion was about historic data. As we are a new newer company to HCSS, they're in year one, at what point do you start seeing the benefits of this data? And what challenges do you face with the quality of the data received from the field that impact what you bid in the future? Yeah. I don't I don't think it takes long at all. Once you start bidding and and and leveraging the software, that's where your historical data starts. It's not a process that takes time at all. It's it's constant tracking and constantly updating what your database is. It's just beneficial. As for challenges you face with the quality of the data received, not not much. I mean, I think there's you're not seeing, you know, tons per hour or anything like that, you know, really jumping out at you. You're looking at a cost basis. So it might be a little bit different than what you're used to depending on what you're using before, but, we haven't really had any challenges with what's coming in from the field at all. Yeah. I mean, it goes as simple, simple as garbage in, garbage out. I mean, as you're going through and looking at your history, and that production history, it's pretty easy to filter through the ones that, I would say are bad. And you can kinda tell there's an outlier there and kinda just pick the median production of whatever, it is you're looking for. But, also, if you're newer to HCSS, it takes some setup. We had to do this about five years ago is go back through, you know, several dozen projects and reupload them into the heavy job system and have those all link into heavy bid as well. So you're not looking at two different modules for production. So you can go get some of that order data if you guys have it. It does take a minute, but it's a tremendous benefit to have. And the next question is, my problem is not getting the IIJA projects. We have one point two billion already for twenty five twenty six. It's getting the report the reporting compliance correct using HCSS software. We're a nonprofit. Do you have examples of completed IIJA projects? I don't know that, we necessarily have projects to deliver, but do you, have any words of advice on how to get the correct reporting out of out of HCSS to, basically, to to stick with, to fit into the mold for those particular projects? Honestly, we haven't had any issues with reporting appliances on those particular projects, so I can't say we've had any issues where we needed to leverage software additionally. I don't know about you, Alex. No. Same. I haven't really ran into that situation yet either. Is there, like, a report they're missing or something that needs done? I'm not we really haven't any issues with the way the software works for us. Let me see if he responds. If not, I'll, I'll provide my, email address, and we can continue this conversation outside of the webinar. Looks like another question came in, and that is, has the reporting helped you improve transparency across the departments and stakeholders? Maybe it's been beneficial for opportunity meetings, deciding which opportunities to bid on, looking at your whole pipeline, etcetera. Yeah. Absolutely. It helps us track bid results like Greg kinda mentioned earlier. You can kinda upload each project as it comes in and run different reports. It's all customizable. If you're used to working in HeavyBid and the custom reports you can do out of there, it works just the same way, and do it by specific date range. You know, if there's, you know, quarterly reports you gotta turn in, and kinda see how you're doing, you know, quarter four of twenty four compared to quarter four of, you know, twenty three. And do you have the real time data there? It'll take a minute to build up, you know, once you start with precom. But once it's there, it's locked in there, and it's a hundred percent customizable to enroll quick to export a report to Excel and get the information you need. I think Alex nailed it on the head there with real time. That's been the big improvement for us. We used to have weekly, monthly reports, and you'd be sitting there kinda waiting on Monday to see, you know, where where we sit on everything. And instead, you know, as we got rolling on pre con, I was thrown around to stakeholders, senior managers setting up certain pre con templates for themselves so they can just go in there and open up that template. There it is. It's right there. As soon as a estimator marks job active, we're a little bitter. That report starts going. You know, relating over to, you know, aggregates and asphalt plants and aggregate sites. It's the same thing. It's it's a one click of a button, and everything is updated immediately, which has been a big improvement for us. And do you see any impact on IRA funding? Not really. I don't know, Greg. What do you think? Not really. No. Okay. I was hoping I was hoping I was hoping Alex would have a better answer. Yeah. Sorry. I was waiting for you to respond. Sorry. No worries. Do y'all ever receive a request from owners for for KPIs for a specific project that was, ever rewarded? No. We have not. Those are more for those are more for internal use for companies. I don't know really what owner kinda wanna know where each company's is. I don't know what benefit would be for them at all, but those are more for internal use for your, own benefit to kinda see where you need to be and where you perform well. We have we have had a couple yeah. It's not so much KPIs, but some of the larger major projects, the DOT will require us to kind of put our bid data inside, a legitimate sealed envelope they could store away. So we were able to quickly access those reports through heavy bid and precond and have those available, but I don't even think those sealed envelopes even been open on any of those projects before. All that work just sitting in a drawer. Yeah. Exactly. Looks like we got a follow-up to the, to the reporting question, and that was, everything has to be reported in an hourly basis. Design and engineering to project closeout. No percentages. Estimates have to be submitted before projects have been designed or funded. So it looks like they're kinda they're submitting the project with a more or less, a blank canvas. And kinda more along the lines of a design build kind of, potential, which we haven't had much of experience in that. Yeah. We're like a cost plus type of contract. That wouldn't really be unfortunately, I don't think that's a tool precom would be would show much benefit for. It's more for the, I wanna say, hard data and hard bid type of work. K. Zach, what what we can do is we can, after the webinar, we can see if we can find someone, one of our customers is doing similar work to you and see about putting you in touch with them and and see if they're willing to, have a conversation with you on that one. Alright. Looks like the questions have slowed down. Does anyone else have anything before we, before we wrap up the webinar? Alright. I feel like we are good to go then. Of course, if you have any other additional questions, feel free to reach out to one of these guys or anyone at HCSS, and we'd be happy to answer any other questions you may have. But thank you all for attending. We really enjoyed it. I thought this was great webinar with some great conversation. So thank you again to Alex, Greg, Aaron, and Paul for helping out here. And, we will be sending this recording so you can watch it back, send it to your friends, all of that good stuff. So be on the lookout for that via email.