As the inventor and leading practitioner of Job Order Contracting (JOC), Gordian has quite literally spent decades espousing the virtues of this alternative procurement method to facility owners and operators. With JOC, owners benefit not only from the time savings of getting work done sooner but also from significant reductions in administrative effort afforded by our assistance with Scope of Work (SOW) creation, contractor recruitment/solicitation and proposal review.
Our solution provides a portal for owners to directly engage with their contractors to track work being performed. The value of this portal is immense to owners trying to manage multiple contracts and contractors at the same time. However, the potential value of a portal for contractors is even more impressive.
As part of a broader market research project, in the past 12 months, Gordian product teams have interviewed over 200 contractors to discuss pain points in the procurement process and the value of a portal to facilitate communication between owners and contractors. Here is what these contractors are telling us they want and need from a construction procurement portal:
- “Help me generate competitive/profitable leads” – I want to know who has projects going out to bid, who is spending and on what. If I know which projects are being planned, I can align my specialties to get profitable leads in my pipeline that also strategically optimizes the availability of bench of employees and subcontractors.
- “Help me manage payments” – I want a simple way to manage payments for multiple contracts with multiple project owners. I work with many owners who appreciate incremental billing where I charge them for completed portions of the total job rather than waiting until the end of the project and charging them for the total. This allows them to write smaller checks along the way and I get to realize revenue for the project sooner (which definitely helps my cashflow). An ideal construction procurement portal would help me better manage progressive billing and incremental payments.
- “Help me streamline communication with owners” – I need an easy way to communicate with all the owners and project managers that I’m working with. Effective communication between all parties streamlines the construction procurement process and helps eliminate change orders and reinforces project timelines and deliverables. A construction procurement portal provides a single record of truth and chain of auditability for all project related meetings, job walks, Scope of Work conversations and development, RFP responses, bid submissions, proposal reviews and project award communications.
- “Help me share our management plan” – I want a centralized mechanism to promote my company’s MBE certifications, specialties and union affiliations. I want to maintain information on my management plan in a single portal that I can then share with multiple owners, rather than having to update each owner or project manager individually. There’s no reason for me to be entering or maintaining that information in multiple places.
- “Help me expand my network (find new owners)” – In addition to the owners that I’m already working with, I want to find owners looking for contractors in my area. Similar to the issue of where I’m maintaining my MBE certifications, it sure would be cool if I could highlight my geographic reach proactively, in one place, and not have to respond to owner inquiries individually.
- “Help me reduce administrative overhead” – I want to leverage automated communications for RFP responses, scheduling job walks, SOW development, bid submissions and JOC standard work. As much as owners appreciate the reduction in administrative costs and delays, I can take on significantly more projects if the portal helps me streamline and automate project communications between my firm and the owner or project manager.
As valuable as a JOC portal is for owners, it seems the potential value for contractors may be even greater.
John Timmerman, Product Marketing Manager at Gordian, wants to hear from you: do you agree or disagree with these responses (or just have a solid opinion on the matter)? He’s always happy to answer your questions and add to our market research!
