Our client runs commercial and residential electrical work across Nassau County. When they came to us, their estimating process was the bottleneck — not because their estimators were slow, but because the process itself required too many manual steps.
The Situation
Each bid took 3–4 hours from scope review to finished proposal. The estimator would pull comparable past projects from a folder of old spreadsheets, check current material costs against supplier PDFs, calculate labor hours based on job type and memory, then format everything into a Word document.
Two estimators meant two sets of pricing logic. One might price a panel upgrade differently than the other depending on which historical jobs came to mind. Proposals going out the same week for similar work could differ by 15–20% for reasons no one could fully explain.
Senior estimators — the people whose judgment actually wins jobs — were spending most of their day on data entry. Finding the right historical bid, transcribing material costs, formatting the output. The cognitive work was the easy part. The mechanical work consumed most of the time.
When bid volume picked up, the constraint hit hard. More projects meant more hours, and there were only so many hours in the day.
What We Built
We built an AI estimating system connected to the company's historical bid database, current supplier price feeds, and their labor rate tables.
An estimator opens a job, enters the scope — square footage, panel specs, fixture counts, job classification — and the system assembles a first-pass proposal. It pulls from comparable past projects, applies current material pricing, and calculates labor against established rate tables. The output is a structured, formatted proposal.
The system does not replace the estimator's judgment. It removes the data retrieval and formatting work so that judgment is the only thing left. Edge cases — unusual site conditions, non-standard materials, scope ambiguity — get flagged for human review. Standard work moves through in under an hour.
Both estimators now work from the same system-generated baseline. Pricing differences still happen when the scope warrants it. But the arbitrary inconsistency — different answers to the same question depending on who ran the estimate — is gone.
Results
Estimating time dropped from 3–4 hours to under 45 minutes per bid on standard projects. The 65% reduction is an average across job types; straightforward residential work comes in faster, complex commercial work still takes longer but the floor is much lower.
Bid consistency improved. Running the same scope through the system produces the same starting point every time. Estimators adjust from there based on site conditions and judgment, but they're adjusting a consistent baseline rather than building from scratch.
The senior estimator's description of the change was direct: before, most of the day was spent pulling numbers. Now it's spent reviewing and refining the ones the system surfaces. That's the job they were hired to do.
The company can now take on more bid volume without adding estimating headcount. The constraint moved.
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