Streamlined estimates leading to faster, more accurate bids

The Challenge

Smart Charge America expertly installs electric vehicle charging stations all over the country—for home use, for the workplace, for retail locations—wherever they’re needed. Working across many different regions and economies, Smart Charge America’s use of inflexible pricing spreadsheets slowed the process and led to inconsistencies.

The Solution

Smart Charge America discovered Procore Estimating (formerly Esticom), whose platform includes customizable take-off lists, so estimators can hit the ground running and become regionally competitive.

The Results

• Dynamic pricing data helps apply regionally relevant costs to any project with ease
• The cloud-based platform makes accessing estimates from any smart device as simple as using a phone

Smart Charge America’s Electric Vision

Smart Charge America saw the Electric Vehicle revolution coming and positioned themselves to be leaders. Today they are building charging stations across the nation. All those regions and locales have their own economies and markets, where both materials and labor costs are deeply embedded in the locale. Smart Charge America made use of pricing spreadsheets in their bidding—inflexible lists of costs that did not address the change from region to region. This lack of adaptability added time to the process of creating the estimate, and often produced inconsistencies. The flexible estimating model Smart Charge America needed to best serve their customers was not to be found in their spreadsheets.

"During the estimating process, many times we would have to improvise with respect to pricing out a project," says David Laderberg, Vice President of Smart Charge America. "This led to inconsistent pricing. We had no organized central database of labor or material pricing to use in building an estimate. We had no easy way to adjust labor rates for the specific customer situation or location."

Data Where and When it is Needed

Today, Smart Charge America leverages Procore Estimating’s cloud-based solution—immediately gaining remote information access from any device, and a clearly organized platform whose searchable parts catalog provides regionally relevant labor and materials information. The readily available data makes it easy to update pricing and minimize inconsistencies. Additionally, Procore’s API capabilities enable integration with Smart Charge America’s CRM system, accounting and billing platform, and onsite information capture tools.

Estimating Productivity and Accuracy

Since using Procore Estimating, productivity and quoting accuracy have increased thanks to Procore’s purpose-built estimating software and management tools. Field teams are now able to leverage organized take-off lists through the user interface, which means they spend less time piecing jobs together from scratch.

The ability to reference and evaluate estimates after the job gives Smart Charge America access to data previously inaccessible, making future estimates more accurate. Furthermore, the API integration capabilities—connecting CRM, accounts and billing, and the centralized parts database—enables the sales team to sell faster and with more confidence.

"All of the other estimating solutions we looked at were antiquated thick-client solutions that offered little to no flexibility," says Laderberg. "Estimating in the cloud with Procore Estimating, apart from the immediate benefits of data accessibility from anywhere, has proven to us that Procore is a forward-thinking company that is taking estimating into the 21st century."