Demand for higher productivity in the construction sector and environmental sustainability is reaching a critical level and causing significant changes in both construction cost estimating and the AEC industry as a whole.

Major Trends:

Shift to life-cycle cost visibility for new construction, renovation, repair, operations, and maintenance

Emphasis upon estimate and project sharing, collaboration, and reuse (vs. reinventing the wheel or recreating mistakes)

Use of smart object/component technologies to enable easier development and maintenance of cost models

Availability of international cost/performance data

Integration of estimating with business and procurement “best practices”/business process will be the norm (LEAN, IPD, JOC, BIM)

Advanced web centric cost data management, sharing, and data reuse

Required use of reference cost data across all sectors

Greater emphasis upon maintenance as a primary sustainability solution

Overall higher level of standardization (currently common in other business sectors)

Standard use of visual estimating tools (i.e. eTakeoff /BIM/QTO)

Estimating and estimators will become key components of collaborative value-driven construction “best-practices”/”business processes” such as IPD, JOC, LEAN, and BIM.

The ability to draw create, actively reuse, and share localized, national, and international life-cycle reference cost databases spanning construction, operations, and maintenance will drive transparency and add a needed level of cost control as well as ongoing decision support for architects, designer, owners, contractors, vendors, and oversight groups.

While innovators are currently deploying IPD and JOC solutions and taking advantage of the inherent costs savings, and improvement of quality and collaboration, these and synergistic processes will become the norm and complementary to BIM.

For example, today estimators using off-the-shelf technology (for example e4Clicks Project Estimating software – http://www.4clicks.com) can select standard or customized cost guides/cost databases, prepare, update, and share estimates and projects, track project status, and apply time saving visualization/calculation on screen take off technology (for example eTakeoff which is fully integrated with e4Clicks).

Estimators and all related professionals will participate earlier and throughout the life-cycle:

Estimators, owners, facilities managers, end users, contractors and vendors will be a part of the design, construction, renovation, repair, maintenance and operations processes, enabling a life-cycle perspective to be applied to all decisions.

Decision support systems will be outcome-driven with life cycle cost, performance, function, and reuse consideration appropriately weighted.

Collaboration, communication, documentation, and transparency will be the norm

Risk and reward are value-based balanced among all participants/constituencies

Quality and sustainability will be primary drivers

While many of the changes are inevitable, some estimators continue with ad-hoc methods; spreadsheets, subcontractor and vendor quotes, etc, resulting in an increased gap and range of estimates.

IPD – Integrated Project Delivery

JOC – JOB Order Contract

QTO – Quantity Takeoff
http://www.4Clicks.com