Why ArciFab Bid

THE PROBLEM

Three tools and a typed proposal.

Tool one: the leads

Invitations in an inbox, a plan room login, and a list somebody keeps on their own machine. Nobody can say what you are actually chasing this month.

Tool two: the numbers

A spreadsheet somebody built years ago, that one person understands, that breaks quietly when a rate changes.

Tool three: the document

The proposal gets typed. The number gets read off one screen and keyed into another. That is the version the customer sees.

And no BOM

You priced every piece of it to win the job. None of that survives the handoff. Somebody builds the bill of material again from scratch.

Every seam between those four is a person re-entering something the business already knew. The re-entry is where the errors live, and the errors are in the number you signed.

WHERE YOU ARE

You already know which list you are on.

You’re done with

a lead in an inbox

a number in a spreadsheet

a proposal typed by whoever is still in the office

nothing carrying forward

You’re ready for

one list of what you are chasing

the estimate built on your rates

a proposal that comes off that estimate

a BOM out the other end

ON A REAL WEEK

What it looks like.

Storage tanks and process piping at an industrial plant

The version that goes out the door is the one nobody had time to check.

The number was finished at four. The document got built at five, by whoever was still there, from the last thing they were sent — which is not always the last thing that changed. It goes out because the clock says it has to. The check that would have caught it is the step there was no room for.

Hands working on insulated pipe under a ceiling

Precon and estimating are not looking at the same list.

Precon is tracking what the company intends to chase. Estimating is working whatever landed in the inbox this week. The two lists overlap and nobody can say by how much. Somebody finds out at the wrong moment that a job everyone assumed was covered has no owner on it.

Worker beside a large-bore pipe section on a job site

The won job hands the floor a total, not a BOM.

You priced every piece of it to win. What crosses to the shop is a contract value and a set of drawings. The quantities that produced the number are sitting in a file somebody would have to go and find, so the floor takes the job off again from scratch. The company pays for that count twice and only ever counts it once.

ONE INSTANCE

One room, front to back.

From the job you chase to the piece that ships. One instance.

Job sourcing

Estimate

Proposal

BOM

Nothing gets re-typed if it lives in one instance.

WHY IT STAYED THIS WAY

The back of the house got built. The front never did.

Fabrication got real systems. Production got tracked, scheduled, documented. The money that went into this trade went into the part you could see on a floor.

The front of the house — deciding what to chase, what it costs, and what to send — was left to whatever the estimator could assemble on their own. It works because your people are good, not because the system is.

That is the hole Bid fills. Not another tool beside the other three. The room where all four steps live.

WHAT CHANGES

One room, and it is yours.

Nothing gets re-typed

Sourcing feeds the estimate. The estimate produces the proposal and the BOM. One chain, one instance.

No champion required

The rates and assemblies live in the system, not in one person's spreadsheet. It survives them taking a week off.

Your name on it

A dedicated instance, white-labeled as yours. Your format, your rates, your assemblies.

A BOM that carries

The work you did to win the job becomes the list you build from. It does not get thrown away at handoff.

THE FIRST CALL

What we will not do.

No feature tour before we have heard how you chase work.

No price before we understand the bid.

No second brand on the login screen.

The work gets won
before anybody picks up a torch.