How Clark Construction finds the expensive problems on bid day, not on site

The Challenge

Two people wrote every scope, and the questions came out too late

Clark Construction is an employee owned general contractor in the Puget Sound region of Washington. The team builds multi family housing, community buildings and commercial work.

Scoping took a week per project

One senior manager or estimator wrote every subcontractor scope from the drawings and specifications. On an $8 to 10 million project, that took about a week.

Only senior staff could write a scope

Writing a scope and checking it needed someone with 30 to 40 years of experience. The people who had it were needed on everything else too.

RFI answers took up to three weeks

Contracts now give the architect and owner up to three weeks to answer an RFI. On a six month project, a late question costs money.

On how the RFIs used to come out:

“It usually takes the life of the project to get all those questions out, and you usually don’t get them all out.”

— Rachele Turnbull, CEO, Clark Construction

The Solution

Scope Agent and RFI Agent, run before the bid goes in

The drawings and specifications go in first. Clark uploads the project documents as soon as they have them, on hard bids, negotiated work and design build.

RFI Agent lists every conflict. It flags where the drawings disagree with the specification, where two sections disagree, and where a rule does not belong on the project. Each one is rated high, medium or low.

Scope Agent writes the first draft of every scope. It works from the Clark trade package list, so the output lands in the format the team already uses.

A senior manager still signs it off. Every conflict and every scope is read before it goes out.

On what surprised her:

“I didn’t expect it to be as intuitive as it is. It’s not just accurate. It’s also thinking big picture.”

— Rachele Turnbull, CEO, Clark Construction

The New Process at Clark

On a recent public bid, RFI Agent came back with 397 conflicts. Rachele dropped the minor items and the duplicates and kept the 100 that would change the price for Clark or for another bidder. That took three hours. The questions went to the architect before the bid date.

Only questions that change the price go out. A bulb specified two different ways is ignored. A fixture priced at $100 in one place and $600 in another gets a question.

Rules that do not apply get caught. One set of documents referenced California statutes for a job in Washington. Clark asked before the bid and the answer was to ignore it. Without that question, a strict owner could have held every bidder to California rules.

The conflict list trains the project engineers. Project engineers get the full set and work out which conflicts are real. It makes them learn the drawings.

Clark skips bids with poor drawings. When the conflicts showed poor drawings and high risk, Clark did not bid.

On sending 100 questions before the bid:

“It really did affect the cost of the bid. It levelled the playing field at the beginning of the project instead of fighting these issues later.”

— Rachele Turnbull, CEO, Clark Construction

Their ROI

The numbers so far

A commercial building under construction, concrete frame with a tower crane

What Clark has seen:

A week of scoping is now two or three days. That is 16 to 24 hours saved on every project.

30 to 40 hours saved on RFIs per project. The questions come out in one pass at the start, not over months.

About $50,000 saved on one bid. RFI Agent flagged that the drawings said PEX and the specification said copper, at two to three times the cost across multiple houses. Clark asked the architect which one applied before pricing, so the copper cost never went into the bid.

Senior managers get their time back. They use it to train new estimators and to run the company.

On what she would tell another general contractor:

“It’s not so much the hours. It’s being able to get the questions you didn’t know to ask out before the bid. That saves many more thousands of dollars than the hours you save.”

— Rachele Turnbull, CEO, Clark Construction

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