With a new wave of federal highway work expected to come with the passage of the federal infrastructure bill, the bidding and oversight of these jobs could get complicated. In October, the Federal Highway Administration awarded a $10-million, two-year contract to fully migrate the bidding and construction management systems of the Federal Lands Highway program to Aurigo Software’s Masterworks suite, a big shift for the agency.

The contract covers the bidding, project management and construction management of work on FLH’s federally owned assets. The agency’s work includes oversight of 500,000 miles of roads, 8,500 bridges and over 400 transit systems across all 50 states. The two-year contract comes with possible renewals for up to 10 years total.

“This is a huge milestone for us,” says Balaji Sreenivasan, CEO and founder of Aurigo Software. “We’ve done some federally funded work before, but this is our first federal government award.” 

The migration effort will involve bringing FLH’s construction management and asset management systems over to Aurigo’s cloud-based platform, which will be used by over 500 FLH employees as well as their external vendors and contractors. According to Sreenivasan, while the cloud-based system will allow for team members to stay up to date, an offline mobile application for work on sites without cellular coverage is also expected to get a lot of use, given the remote location of many FLH assets. 

Sreenivasan says the RFP asked for this offline mode, as some PM software can’t do much on mobile devices without a decent connection. “We want to allow an inspector to download a form and fill it out in the field, and when the app has a signal it’ll send the data in packets and can sync with interruptions. No more spinning wheels.”