fashion for a customer shows them that you really care about their project.”
In addition to caring about what the custom-
ers wants, it is just as important to care about the project’s effect on your company. In the stress of competing against more companies and needing to win bids to stay in business, everyone SDM spoke with advised using extreme caution when setting margins. The consensus? Stay reasonable. Liguori points out, “A significant differentiator in this current market is price, so the challenge pre- sented is how to lower the price of the bid without effecting profit margin beyond a reasonable level.” In the current market, that number has gone lower
and lower, but successful companies stay away from bidding on projects that stretch them too far.
Newman says, “During the past year, we have seen a continued erosion of margins. Gross margins for some of the smaller, simpler projects have dropped into the single digits. This is simply not enough to pay the overhead costs at a security integrator that provides top level service. Sadly, it seems some of the security integrators out there are bidding this low in a last desperate attempt to stay in business. With the large number of bidders on many projects and the reduced margins, we have taken to carefully examining each bid prior to beginning the estimating process. If we feel the bid is poorly written or will not support the necessary margins, we will pass on it. This allows us to focus our resources
confidence to win the sale; while for management, the software creates a solid business platform to manage your products, prices and labor,” Reihl explains.
Bidding software can go a long way to improving accuracy and creating uniform proposals across your company. Dove Net, an estimating and project management software offered by Dove Net Technologies LLC is developed specific to the indus- try and includes several major features targeting accuracy, including manufacturer price lists, which help the contractor not waste time keeping their price up to date, and price lists that are proprietary or unique to the reseller, which can be imported into the system.
“Once the system has good price lists, all the estimating team can take advantage of those price lists so a few people
To create a proposal in Bid Magic, you enter the client contact information and then select rooms or systems to include in a bid. Then select products for those rooms. The proposal software automatically calculates the equipment and complete labor for each product.
are making many people more efficient in their estimating process,” Nasca says.
The bidding software also helps with uniformity through auto estimating, a feature of Dove Net that allows users to tie labor to hardware so that they can automatically develop the labor costs of a project.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WESUITE
WeEstimate from WeSuite provides integrators the ability to enable sales people to “play” with pricing within param- eters or “thresholds,” which can be set by individuals. So, a sales person can create an estimate and see the cost and sell pricing and be given the ability to change the markup or discounts on those items to see the resulting pricing and overall project gross profit.
“A big benefit to this module is the consistency of bids,” Nasca says. “By using auto estimating, everyone is bidding/ quoting the same way instead of one person quoting one way and another person quoting another way.” Bidding software also heightens efficiency. “Being able to respond very quickly and getting bid responses out quickly to customers. We have heard from our customers that they have won bids due to their efficiency in getting responses to custom- ers,” Larson says.
Whether purchased or in-house, a bidding software that complements your company, combined with training, in-house documents and methodologies, produces the best, most accurate bid possible. It’s an accurate approach to achieve accurate bids.
October 2010 71
PHOTO COURTESY OF BID MAGIC
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