Prior to basis, the estimating team at Negwer Door Systems coordinated bids across four regional offices and would receive 100+ emails per day, ranging from new bid invites to addendas and RFIs. Like most contractors, Negwer used a master spreadsheet shared across all offices and all estimators. Each row in this bid log tracked a single bid and contained necessary information like due-date, times emails were received, the general contractor, and the assigned estimator.
Erich Ruhmann, an Estimator at Negwer Door Systems, was in charge of checking Negwer’s estimating inbox three times a day and updating the bid log. However, managing a 20-person estimating team and coordinating multi-office efforts through a bid log and manual process was error-prone, inefficient, and caused problems.
“The biggest issue we were running into was tracking a high-volume of bid requests and coordinating the bid deadlines and project details with multiple offices without duplication of bids for the same project.”
After spending years painfully adding lines to a spreadsheet, Erich immediately understood why basis could help improve productivity and bid tracking.
“When you added 30 new bids, that’s 30 new lines that you needed to copy and paste into the spreadsheet while ensuring you did not alter the cell formatting. Using a manual entry spreadsheet was tedious and labor-intensive. .”
Concretely, Basis helped in the following ways:
“We have not only been able to eliminate all of our old excel tracking documents, but we have also been able to stay on top of our high-volume of bids and coordinate with multiple offices with much more ease.”
As with any great story, the story had a major plot twist. Although Erich saw tremendous value in the basis solution, estimating directors and VPs were initially skeptical. To convince leadership, Erich volunteered to run basis and Negwer’s old spreadsheet side-by-side for a month, and the results were unequivocally in favor of basis.
