ArciFab Bid — Win the work

WHY

Winning work is still three tools and a typed proposal.

The lead lives in one place. The numbers get built somewhere else. The proposal gets typed a third time, by hand, by whoever is still in the office. Nothing carries forward, so everything gets re-entered — and the version that goes out the door is the one nobody had time to check.

MEP never got a real front end. The floor got software. The estimate got a spreadsheet.

Why Bid exists

BEFORE THE ROOM

Where the work actually sits right now.

Process piping and structures on an industrial plant

The lead lives in an inbox.

A general contractor sends an invitation to bid. It lands in one person’s email, or a folder that person named, or on a whiteboard by their desk. Nobody else knows the job exists until they mention it. When they are out for a week the clock on it runs anyway.

The number lives in a spreadsheet.

Quantities get counted in one place and priced in another. Somebody re-keys the takeoff into a sheet built years ago by a person who has since left. It works because one estimator remembers what every column does. That is not a system, it is a habit with a file name.

Welder working on a large-diameter pipe section

The proposal gets typed last.

Everything has been decided before the document exists. Then somebody rebuilds it by hand, usually the afternoon it is due. What leaves the building is the third format the same numbers have been in, and nobody goes back to check the first two against it.

WHAT

One room, front to back.

From the job you chase to the piece that ships. One instance. Each step hands off to the next. Nothing gets re-typed.

Step one

Job sourcing

The work you are chasing, in one list, with what you know about it attached — not scattered across inboxes and a whiteboard.

Step two

Estimate

Labor and material built on your rates and your assemblies — the way your people already price, not a generic template.

Step three

Proposal

Comes off the estimate that produced it, in your format, under your name. Not retyped from a number somebody read off another screen.

Step four

BOM

A real bill of material out the other end — the thing the estimate always implied but never actually produced.

WHAT IT COSTS TO LEAVE IT

The bid is where the money is decided. The stack is where it leaks.

Three figures the industry already publishes. None of them are about your shop, and none of them are a promise — they are the reason the room is worth having in one place instead of five.

Typical annual renewal increase on a subscription platform 10–15%

As published in ArciFab Insights, “End the Annual Hostage Negotiation for Your Own Data.”

Reduction in rework and waste tied to end-to-end digitalization Up to 20%

McKinsey, cited in ArciFab Insights, “You Don’t Know What You’re Missing.”

Field labor cost estimated as waste or unproductive time, U.S. construction 11–15%

FMI, cited in ArciFab Insights, “You Don’t Know What You’re Missing.”

Bars are drawn on a common 0–25% scale. These are industry patterns, not your shop’s numbers, and nobody should pretend they are — they only help an operation that can see its own process. Figures as published in ArciFab Insights.

HOW

We already priced and won work.

We have sat in the chair

We ran the shop and the business. We have priced jobs, sent proposals, and lived with the ones we got wrong. Bid is built out of that, not out of a requirements doc.

A dedicated instance

Your own environment, white-labeled as yours. Your rates, your assemblies, your proposal format — not a shared platform you have to work around.

Evaluate, then stand it up

We look at how you already chase and price work before anything gets configured. The room comes after that.

How Bid gets stood up

The work gets won before
anybody picks up a torch.