For water authorities, investing in capital expenditure is not only a necessity to meet the obligations to your customers in delivering outstanding service, but also a regulatory obligation.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this, with both state and federal governments investing billions of dollars into their infrastructure programs. While this accelerated spending is great for water authorities and the community, it also means increased scrutiny from regulators in ensuring the money is spent wisely and on budget.
So how do you ensure you can maintain or increase investments in capital works while also bringing those costs down to gain better bang for your buck?
It all starts with using a sophisticated estimating platform.
Below we outline some of the keyways in which an estimating platform can help.
1. Cost controls and budget certainty
Gaining control over your costs is essential to maximising profitability and productivity. By using an estimating platform, estimates can be completed faster and more accurately, allowing you to move onto other important jobs.
2. No spread sheets
Estimators using different spreadsheets brings a lack of consistency and potential for increased data entry errors. Eliminate the errors and inconsistency with an estimating solution that houses all relevant information within the single platform.
3. Increased accuracy and consistency
Collect, build and store valuable intelligence for your estimators in software libraries, creating a consistent and more accurate starting point for all users to access. This also saves time and eliminates the need to re-enter data or re-create formulas, reducing the risk of missing costs.
4. Repetitive costing model/routines
Routines allow you to repetitively price tasks or project with many parameters easily and quickly. By simply answering a series of questions, the estimate will be ready in record time, allowing you to produce hundreds of quotes quickly.
5. In-built reporting
Data analysis is crucial across any project and across a range of projects. Ensuring your solution provides a range of reports and exports in multiple formats as well as customisable dashboards for quick analysis is crucial to project managers and others in an organisation understanding the make-up of a project.
6. Moving to the cloud
A cloud based SaaS platform not only allows you to access your estimates anytime, anywhere but also reduces the costs and time taken to set up and maintain internal IT infrastructure, allowing you to put more money into your capital works programs.
7. Integrations
By using a platform that is capable of integrating with other industry-leading software platforms provides customers with enormous benefits including time savings, minimising double entry of data and human errors, maximising profits and streamlining business processes.
Common platforms for integration include design, project management, job costing and accounting.
