At R.D. Johnson Excavating Company located in Lawrence Kansas, project manager Branden Boyd had spent a lot of years estimating projects with pencil and paper. However, he knew there must be a way to work more efficiently, effectively and strategically–so in January 2006, he started using BID2WIN.

“Bidding larger projects created a need to switch to an estimating software package for ease of maintenance, organization, tracking and thoroughness” says Boyd. Where he once spent painstaking hours preparing each bid, he now builds estimates quickly and efficiently with BID2WIN. “The crew templates create simplicity and decrease the amount of time it takes to bid a project.”

With paper and pencil, Boyd had to manually locate paper files with past bids and historical cost information. Now, BID2WIN automatically saves his estimates and bids, and all costs are stored in one location, the application’s centralized resource database.

According to Boyd, the biggest advantage of using BID2WIN is standardizing repetitive bids. “Utility work and street work projects can be similar around the area we work in and the type of crews and procedures used are repetitive, although the production rates may vary. Bidding these types of projects becomes a streamlined process with BID2WIN software.”

Since switching to BID2WIN, R.D. Johnson Excavating has experienced great results. “The biggest return on investment that we have experienced is on a 4.5 million dollar project,” says Boyd. “We bid the project and were low, but the project was over budget. They decided to bid the project again and with the minor changes they made to the plans to meet the budget, we ended up being low again. Having BID2WIN software simplified the re-bidding process tremendously. The software has enabled us to bid large scale projects with ease and allows us to keep track of each item that we bid.”

As the primary estimator for R.D. Johnson, Boyd has had “the luxury to use a few different estimating software packages. In comparison, BID2WIN is by far the easiest and most user friendly estimating software package out today.”

To learn more go to www.rdjohnsonexcavating.com

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