QUANTA SERVICES

FAST, LOW-IMPACT SOLUTION

When reviewing the leading options on the market, Quanta Energized Services looked for an estimating solution that would integrate with key productivity tools: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, and Primavera P6. “While the main goal was streamlining and standardizing our estimating processes, we wanted to do so without impacting existing working practices,” says Greer. “Project estimates are the data source for multiple internal reports used by project stakeholders at all levels. We wanted to improve the quality and consistency of estimating, without making life difficult for those stakeholders.”

Choosing InEight Estimate gave Quanta the specialized tool set it needed for estimating, combined with the tight integration it wanted. “InEight’s Excel integration was a huge win, giving us the ability to present information to managers the same way they’d always received it,” says Greer. “InEight Estimate allowed us to create bid-summary sheets in Excel that looked the same as the existing ones, but populated with high-quality data. The solution also gave us easy integration with both Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project.”

InEight Estimate’s ability to integrate with the project management tools Quanta Services already used was beneficial not only in ensuring a smooth transition, but also in terms of accelerating workflows. “At first, we didn’t realize how impactful the two-way schedule integration was going to be,” recalls Greer. “You finish your estimate, push it to the schedule, and right away you can see all your activities, durations, resources, and cost-loading. Even for power users of P6, it would previously take days to produce a balanced cost-loaded schedule from an estimate created in Excel. Today, going from InEight Estimate to a full schedule in P6 takes just an hour or two — and that has improved both our back-office productivity and buy in to the process at the operational level.”