June 12, 2007

Construction Boom Spurs Internet Activity

Electronic documents benefit the construction industry

Jean Sorensen

Correspondent

Alberta’s red-hot construction boom fuelled by its oil and gas sector is spurring the Edmonton Construction Association (ECA) to ramp up its efforts on the Internet to keep contractors better appraised of new jobs and ensure that tendering authorities receive the widest circulation of their projects. While it began posting electronic documents in 1999, there has been an increased effort over the past year.

Executive director Darlene La Trace says the ECA requests that tendering authorities send electronic copies of projects being put out to tender as well as hard copies. The electronic copy being sought is a native file, not a scanned one. Scanning documents in the ECA office and then posting them results in a lower quality document and secondly is time consuming, especially when a native file already exists.

The ECA provides tender postings not only in Alberta but Western Canada and some in the U.S. Available contracts can be accessed on the ECA’s website, COOLNet Edmonton.

“For tendering authorities, it is a much more productive way of working with the construction industry,” says La Trace, adding that only submitting a hard-copy greatly limits the exposure to potential bidders, an important factor in today’s brisk industry.

While the newer generations of contractors are computer-savvy and comfortable with accessing documents via the Internet, there is are still members who are not. Progress is occurring, but much of the industry still remains conventional in sourcing listings. Part of the reason is that older generation contractors have not naturally assimilated the computer skills that many younger people realize when moving through the public school system today.

For those with few or no computer skills, La Trace says the ECA has organized five computer Internet training sessions in the past six months. “It’s not really our mandate,” says La Trace, but it lends itself to better serving the ECA’s primary goal as a repository for tender authorities. Enhanced computer skills will allow many of the industry’s senior contractors to better access the data being supplied by tender authorities.

Executive director Darlene La Trace

The ECA has been able to measure the changes that are happening as more contractors turn to the Internet to access tender documents. The ECA tracks the numbers of physical visits of individuals to the plan room to view projects. To June-end 2000, there were 8,416 visits over the six month period. This was a period, says La Trace, when there was only limited computerized access to documents. When the same period is compared in 2006, the number of visitations dropped to 4,350, indicating that almost half of those who once physically visited now turn to an Internet access.

The decrease in visits is not related to any reductions in postings by tendering authorities. “We operate one of the busiest plan rooms in all of Canada,” says La Trace, adding that on any given day there are more than 100 posted projects. Figures also show that for the first six months of 2006, a total of 853 projects were posted compared to the same period in 2005 when your 587 were entered. “This is approximately a 44 per cent increase in projects, which is pretty incredible,” says La Trace. In addition, the ECA has steadily been collecting e-mail and websites addresses of construction industry members and watched each year as the list has grown.

In today’s busy environment, there are advantages to both the ECA and the contractor in having electronic copies of tendered projects. There is a reduction in the number of phone and fax queries that the office staff is required to handle. At the same time, contractors can access documents outside regular office hours and not travel to the office to view documents. “There is a tremendous saving in travel time and fuel,” says La Trace. In addition, the site is searchable and special trades can quickly locate contracts that relate to their particular scope.

A further benefit is the connectivity that exists in today’s technological environment, which allows contractors to check in from any location – such as a job site via laptop or an associate’s office via Internet during a business meeting.

The success of ECA’s initiative to make more documents readily available via the Internet has prompted it to begin a second more private postings area on site. It is a pilot project catering to general contractors who need to publicize information such as sourcing sub-trades or posting change orders. Invited companies can access via a password. Currently, the private area is being tested using one contractor but in 2007, La Trace said it is hoped that more general contractors can be added.

“This is something that our general contractors have never had through our Association but we have recognized that there is a real need for this,” she says.

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