State of Software

Sharpen your pencils, in fact you may want to sharpen two! Construction firms are doing whatever they can do get their estimates tight. With competition growing in the commercial and residential construction sectors as fewer and fewer projects are receiving financing, all eyes are on the sales and estimating side of the industry.

Focusing on the estimating side of the house, the folks over at Software Advice decided to put together their first “Construction Software State of the Industry Report” based on feedback from 6,000 construction software buyers and I have to say it’s worth a read.

Very quick to point out that reporting on the state of the industry isn’t interesting, they do claim to have found some interesting trends and are willing to share!

Here are their findings:
1. Estimating and takeoff solutions are in demand.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS) is where it’s at.
3. LEED credit tracking has created a new demand.
4. Stimulus funds are trickling down, slowly
5. Fewer accounting and job costing replacements

My only issue with the article was that it seems as thought software in the construction industry would be far more vast. In additional to tools for estimating, there are tools for designing, specification writing, CRM, project management, product selection, etc. Then there are the trades and the question does arise as to whether you can treat them all the same.

It seems as if Software Advice does in fact cater to the various trades, and can provide insight on a variety of types of software, but I was hoping for a better lay of the software landscape. This being their first such attempt at something like this, we can give them the benefit of the doubt, but it just left me wanting a bit more.

While they are probably eager to to hear your thoughts on the spending, I’m personally interested in whether stories like this are of interest to Konstructr readers.

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