A professional construction cost estimator in an important team member of any Owner, Contractor, or AE organization’s involvement in a facility renovation, repair, sustainability, or new construction project. A cost estimator’s role is to review the many factors, variables, and information sources associated with a construction project and to present an accurate total cost (the latter may include subtotals by Uniformat and/or MasterFormat categories, materials, labor/crews, productivity factors/coefficients, equipment, overhead/profit,...Continue Reading
While accurate, timely, and transparent cost estimating is critical to the success of any renovation, repair, sustainability, or new construction project, most construction cost estimators (over 55%) continue to rely primarily upon manual methods, hard copy documents, or electronic spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. Lack of robust business processes, management practices, proper education and training, and some degree of technophobia endemic to our AECOO industry (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Operations, Owner)...Continue Reading
It’s amazing how many cost estimators exclusively use spreadsheets. In end, this practice creates more problems than it solves. Certainly spreadsheets play an important role, however, study after study has proven them to be inefficient and prone to error when collaboration is required, or when relatively sophisticated databases are commonly used. The solution for Owners, Contractors, and Owners to “keeping pace” and “doing even more with less” in today’s environment...Continue Reading
Unit price books are unit price-based cost databases referenced by a particular JOC or SABER contract. In some cases UPBs can be task-based; however, this method doesn’t provide a level of detail consistent with the practices of most construction cost estimators. RSMeans is used in the majority of JOC contracts in the United States (over 80%) as a baseline, with RSMeans becoming the virtual standard for commercial construction, renovation, and...Continue Reading
Traditional methods such as design-bid-build and even “newer” methods such as design-build are not fully collaborative. The net result is information is not shared by all parties and adversarial components of these methods typically lead to mistrust and waste. Integrated project delivery (IPD) and Job order contracting (JOC), the later also referred to as “IPD-lite” are proven, collaborative, project delivery methods. Both IPD and JOC have been successfully embedded into...Continue Reading
