B2W Estimation Tools Now Tie To Operations in Trimble Cloud
B2W can now export its estimation and field information to the Trimble Construction One ERP.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR
Originally known as Bid2Win when it was founded in the 1990s, B2W has grown from an estimation and field tracking tool to a cloud platform for heavy civil contractors that includes equipment maintenance and management, scheduling and electronic forms to its list of tools. Acquired in 2022 by Trimble, B2W has now been further integrated into the company’s cloud-based software suite Trimble Connect and its single sign-on service, Trimble Construction One.
“It’s required us to do a few things around a single login, [but] we’ve gotten all the software capable of [using] the Trimble ID,” says Bob Brown, B2W president and COO. “We’ve had to modify our licensing model into theirs. Now, we’re able to fit into the Trimble Construction One strategy and take advantage of the other applications receiving information.”
B2W’s platform was designed for heavy contractors so they don’t have to spend extra time chasing down employee hours, verifying bids and estimates and notifying teammates of needed repairs or maintenance. As the platform evolved, it has helped bring field and estimate information together with resource planning.
“We’ve been using their estimating program for almost 25 years, but when they put together a field reporting system —basically, the input into that system comes from estimating—we could then put together the resources, the production rates, everything that you look at as being necessary to do the task to build the job,” says Rich King, CFO at Schlouch Inc., based in Brandon, Pa. “B2W has that estimating and field information.”
While B2W’s platform is cloud-based, they’ve also introduced an app that can send information to it from a mobile device.
“We introduced a field employee app designed for those individuals who don’t have a crew leader at the site,” says Jon Fingland, Trimble’s vice president and category manager. “That might be an independent truck driver or just an excavator operator working in a pit.”
Fingland says the app can upload hours worked, cubic yards moved and any other measurements needed directly to the B2W platform to track performance.
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Tom Garrett, vice president of engineering at Kubricky Construction says the tracked stats have helped their bottom line.
“We’ve told our guys that they have to have a cost code when they turn their time in,” he says. “People inevitably forget and some just make up a number because they knew they had to have a number. Having that [automatically] populated has saved hours of going back and finding that information.”
