BidIntell + Plan Rooms

The problem plan rooms do not solve

Dodge Construction Network, Construct Connect, BuildingConnected, iSqFt, and every other plan room do one thing well: they surface bid opportunities and give you access to the documents. That is their job and they do it.

What they do not tell you is whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. That decision is still on you — and it is the one that costs the most estimating time.

A specialty subcontractor doing five million in revenue is probably receiving 20 to 40 sets of bid documents a month across whatever plan rooms they subscribe to. Every one of those represents a go or pass decision. Most firms make that call by gut feel, a quick scan of the cover sheet, and whatever the estimator happens to know about that GC from experience.

The time spent evaluating bids you were never going to win is time not spent on the ones you could. BidIntell is the filter that goes in between.

Two ways to get bid documents into BidIntell

BidIntell is designed to fit into the workflow you already have, not add a new one on top of it.

Both methods produce the same result: a BidIndex Score in about 60 seconds, with the project details extracted and saved to your dashboard. Most estimators end up using both depending on how a particular GC sends their packages.

The workflow from plan room to scored bid

1. Plan Room Bid documents arrive from your plan room

   Dodge, Construct Connect, BuildingConnected, or a direct GC notification. You receive an email alert with attached documents, or a link to download from the plan room portal.

2. BidIntell Forward the email or upload the documents

   If the bid came by email: forward it to your BidIntell alias address. If it came through a portal: download the package and upload it to BidIntell. Either way, BidIntell handles the extraction from there.

3. BidIntell Get your BidIndex Score in about 60 seconds

   BidIntell extracts the project details and returns a score from 0 to 100 based on your trade match, location fit, history with that GC, and contract risk signals in the documents. The score is specific to your company — the same bid documents score differently for different contractors because the fit is different.

4. Make the go or pass call

   If the score supports it, pull the full plans and start your estimate. If it does not, you have documented reasons to pass without spending days finding out the hard way.

5. BidIntell Log the outcome when the bid closes

   Won, lost, ghosted by the GC, or you declined. Each logged outcome improves the accuracy of future scores for your company with that GC.

Plan rooms BidIntell works alongside

BidIntell does not require an integration or data sync with any plan room platform. It works with the bid documents you receive — whether they arrive as email attachments or downloads from a portal.

What BidIntell looks at in the bid documents

Whether you forward an email or upload a file, BidIntell scans the content for four things that determine whether the opportunity is worth pursuing for your specific company.

Trade match. Does the scope of work align with what your company actually does? BidIntell uses CSI MasterFormat section codes and your trade keywords to assess whether the work is in your wheelhouse. A flooring sub should score differently on a resilient flooring package than on a painting package, even if both arrive from the same plan room on the same day.

Location fit. Is the project in your service territory? Distance and geography factor into whether the work is realistic to pursue profitably.

GC relationship history. How have past bids with this GC gone? If you have logged outcomes from previous projects with this general contractor, that history factors into the score. Over time, BidIntell builds a record of which GCs in your market actually award work to firms like yours.

Contract risk signals. Bid documents often include contract terms or reference the project general conditions. BidIntell scans for risk language — pay-if-paid provisions, broad indemnification, no-damage-for-delay clauses, liquidated damages, and others. These are not automatic pass signals, but they are information worth having before you commit to the estimate.

The plan room found the opportunity. BidIntell tells you whether it is worth the estimating hours before you open a single plan sheet.

What this actually saves

The go or pass decision on a bid — not the estimate itself, just the decision — typically takes 20 to 60 minutes of experienced estimator time when done carefully. For a firm receiving 30 sets of bid documents a month, that is 10 to 30 hours of senior estimating time spent before a single quantity gets taken off.

BidIntell compresses that decision to a few minutes without removing the judgment call. The estimator still decides. The score surfaces the information they would otherwise spend 30 minutes pulling together manually — trade fit, location, GC history, contract terms — before they have opened a single plan sheet.

The forwarding address removes one more step from the workflow. Instead of logging into BidIntell to upload a document, the analysis starts the moment you forward the email. By the time you open BidIntell, the score is already there.

Firms that log outcomes consistently get a compounding benefit over time: the score gets more accurate. The more bid results you track — won, lost, ghosted, declined — the more precisely BidIntell weights the factors that actually predict success for your company with your specific GC relationships in your territory.