5 Signs You’re Wasting Time on Construction RFP Review

Contractors that do serious volume can easily wind up buried in busywork that has nothing to do with actually winning projects.

Not only does RFP review take time, but it also dilutes the quality of your potential output, forcing talented staff to spend hours on what essentially equates to copy-and-paste work. It’s a cost you see in payroll and experience in diminished efficiency.

Here, we look at five signs that your business is wasting valuable time and explain how Pivotly Parse can help you increase your capacity without doubling your payroll.

1. Senior Estimators Are Spending Most of Their Time on Data Entry

Senior estimators working off a broken RFP process can spend up to eight hours per bid cross-referencing information across a vast and often not at all user-friendly 200-page document.

The problem is that in most professional outfits, data extraction is a low-level task that requires high-level supervision.

You wind up paying expert rates for a task that anyone with a small amount of guidance could complete.

If your best people are spending 60 or 70% of their time handling simple work, it’s a strong indication that your RFP process is broken.

 2. Bid Volume Is Limited by Processing Capacity, Not Market Opportunity

Many contractors find that their volume ceiling is limited not by field capacity or market opportunity, but by their ability to process RFPs.

 A dedicated team of three estimators can, at full capacity, process around forty-five bids per month. Anything beyond that, regardless of your field limitations, is beyond your threshold.

Throughout the course of a year, this could cost five to six figures in revenue.

3. Manual Data Entry Creates Significant Financial Risk

Manual processes leave the door open for manual error. Data-entry tasks have an average human error rate of about 1%.

Unfortunately, in this context, mistakes carry significant consequences.  

Errors like:

• Transposed numbers
• Misread quantities
• Overlooked specification changes
• Incorrectly transferred unit prices

may not surface right away. Too often, they’re realized only after the contract award has taken place, and the project has begun.

When that happens, you’re left with only a few unappealing options. You can negotiate again, but often at the risk of customer dissatisfaction.

Otherwise, you just eat the cost.

For plumbing, mechanical, or electrical projects, these mistakes can come with a five-figure price tag that very literally demolishes the profit margin on some projects.

4. Estimating Staff Experience High Turnover and Low Job Satisfaction

RFP review work can quickly take a toll on employee morale. Your estimators want to spend their time applying their technical knowledge to project assessments.

 They are interested in strategic work. When an excessive amount of their time goes toward repetitive administrative tasks, it can create a wearing effect.

Boredom and underutilization are two of the most common causes of employee turnover. Unfortunately, turnover is very expensive, often costing businesses 50% or more of that person’s salary.

That expense is experienced both in diminished productivity and the increasingly high cost of recruiting new people.

Even when disengaged employees stick around, they can still cost businesses money. Boredom can result in:

• Slower work cycles.
• Increased rates of error.
• Diminished attention to detail.

To make matters worse, burnout is often contagious. When one employee’s performance begins to slip, it puts more pressure on everyone else.

Recent studies have shown that when one person becomes disengaged or starts looking for a new job, the likelihood of a coworker following their lead increases by 25%.

5. The Majority of Preconstruction Time Is Spent on Non-Strategic Activity

Consider the work cycle on a typical eight-hour bid process. In most cases, only about three of those hours go to:

• Amortizing the scope of the work.
• Identifying risk factors.
• Processing the information that goes into making a carefully crafted proposal.

Much of the time that remains goes to simpler tasks. Document navigation. Information processing. Formatting. Time that could be much better spent on tasks that create value.

The cost of underutilizing employee talent does not show up neatly on a P&L statement, but it is actually calculable.

First, look at your estimator’s salary. Let’s say that they make $80,000 per year. Now look at how much of their time goes into reviewing RFPs.

If it’s in the ballpark of 50% that means that your RFP costs $40,000 per year, per estimator. That’s before the costs of human error or needlessly low capacity ceilings are taken into account.

Moving Toward Process Improvement

The RFP process is too important to fully automate. However, you can accelerate your workflow and dramatically improve results with the right AI tools.

Pivotly Parse helps eliminate the most time-consuming manual data-extraction tasks. It connects directly to your email and document sources, automatically ingests RFPs as they arrive, extracts specifications, identifies relevant requirements, pulls quantities and line items, and structures everything into a clear, usable format.

Your estimators then receive a notification with all extracted data ready for review. Pivotly Parse is a human-in-the-loop product; it doesn’t replace estimators, but it allows them to complete the busywork significantly faster.

They review the information, make any needed adjustments, and approve the output. The system then syncs everything into your existing tools—your ERP, CRM, or quoting platform.

What could easily take eight hours when done manually can now be completed in just 30–45 minutes.

This gives estimators more time to focus on work that contributes to your bottom line while keeping them engaged on the job.

It also serves as an empowerment tool that allows small teams to handle the volume of much bigger ones.

You can even try without risk. The company allows business owners to see the tool in action with their own plans before buying in.

The cost itself is relatively low, with a $5,000 initial fee followed by a subscription price of $750 per month. Just a small fraction of the loss you’d experience through even one missed job.

Try Pivotly Parse

Ultimately, Pivotly Parse is an income-maximizing tool. It’s not designed to replace your staff. It’s there to ensure that you experience the full talent of your A players.

You don’t hire someone on an almost six-figure salary so they can spend most of their time combing through technical documents.

That’s money better spent on revenue-producing tasks that will help your business reach its full potential.

Book a free assessment with our proof-of-concept offer to see for yourself how transformative this technology can be for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does manual construction RFP review actually cost my business?

You can calculate the cost of your RFP process by taking your estimator’s salary and determining what percent of it goes to time spent reviewing RFPs.

This can be a six-figure expense for businesses with multiple estimators. Pivotly Parse can significantly reduce those costs.

What are the most common manual takeoff problems in specialty contracting?

The biggest risk many businesses face can be as simple as a misplaced decimal point. When quantities are misread or numbers are entered incorrectly, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix the problem.

Why is wasted estimator time such a competitive disadvantage?

Estimators provide the highest-leverage work within your business. When their time is spent excessively on administrative tasks, it limits their capacity and creates a needlessly low ceiling for your business.

Competitors with bigger or more agile teams will naturally get out more bids per month and, by extension, claim more jobs.

Can automation fully replace human estimators in the RFP review process?

It cannot. RFP review is too important to fully automate. A level of human supervision is still required to get good results.

Through automation, that supervision becomes less time-consuming and significantly more cost-effective for your business.