How Prime Build Tenders 20% Faster and Saves Over $600,000 with Workato

In the competitive world of construction, tendering is the gateway to new projects and business growth. For Prime Build, an Australian construction company specialised at delivering projects in live environments, a cumbersome manual tendering process presented challenges that needed urgent attention. 

Before we dive into how low-code enterprise automation and integration enabled Prime Build to save significant time and costs and safeguard their reputation, let’s look into the challenges they had to overcome.

Costly and inefficient tendering

Prime Build had developed an elaborate Tendering and Estimating Procedure to coordinate several moving parts in every tendering process. However, adhering to this procedure required intensive manual heavy lifting, compromising speed and driving up costs. Any oversight could lead to tenders being submitted without proper review – missing or misstated information risked costing the company up to $500,000 annually. 

Yet, each year, over 200 projects, each with around 10 deliverables, were being manually tracked on an Excel spreadsheet that was meant to record every tender and deliverable. Prime Build’s bid manager was overwhelmed by the manual process, and at risk of burnout. To mitigate this, they were faced with having to significantly increase director oversight, which diverted valuable resources from project delivery. Also, each additional day per week of director oversight added $100,000 per year in costs. 

Optimising with end-to-end automations

Prime Build chose to tackle their challenges head on. They used Workato’s low-code platform to automate and integrate key elements of their Tendering and Estimating Procedure with existing software platforms, including Procore’s construction management software, Outlook, Jobpac’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and a custom-built estimation dashboard. 

By automating the manual effort involved, Workato’s robust integrations minimised human error in adhering to the process and in transcribing information. Workato also ensured that essential collaboration and quality assurance events were consistently executed throughout the tendering process.

Here’s how it works:

1. Workato creates a Sharepoint folder library as a database for documents for every tender.
2. Bid coordinator keys in required values into Prime Build’s custom-built estimation dashboard, which Workato automatically syncs to their Jobpac ERP.
3. Bid coordinator then assigns the tender to the Estimator, who accesses the timeline.
4. Workato automatically notifies all project team members on Outlook and sends a calendar invite for the kickoff.
5. Workato also creates a job in Procore, in sync with the dashboard inputs.

Precise, cost-competitive tendering at speed

Here’s what Prime Build achieved with Workato:

• Reduced director oversight saves $100,000 per year. 
• Increased accountability and tender quality allows the business to scale with the same lean bid management team, potentially saving up to $500,000 annually by minimising costly errors.
• More streamlined process saves 2 days per week and $20,000 per annum by enabling  Prime Build to offshore bid creation. 
• 20% increase in effective work time by decreasing lag time between tender allocation and kickoff procedures – saves 4 days in a typical 20-day process for each of the 200 tenders processed annually. 

Next steps: Automating for peak efficiency and excellence

As Prime Build celebrates the remarkable success of their reimagined tendering process, the horizon is already brimming with opportunities to innovate further. The company’s next strategic move is to harness Workato to redefine project management and financial management workflows. By automating to ensure compliance and accountability to core processes that solidify their market leadership, Prime Build aims to further elevate operational efficiency and build the future, one automated process at a time.