Case study · Construction 3 min read
40,000 bid emails and no database. Now agents read them.
Subcontractors drown in invitations to bid. XRQ had over 40,000 in email. Here's how we got that data somewhere safe and put agents to work on it.
The problem we keep seeing
Subcontractors send and receive a huge number of ITBs. They land in inboxes as emails, PDFs and download links. Someone opens each one, saves the drawings, and types the details into a spreadsheet. Then they decide if it's worth bidding.
Miss one and it's a job you never priced. Every sub we talk to has a version of this problem.
It's expensive time, too. Estimators at US specialty trade contractors average about $42 an hour, and the Canadian median is $37.84. A 2018 FMI survey found construction teams spend five and a half hours a week just hunting for project information.
What XRQ was dealing with
XRQ had more than 40,000 bid emails and no database behind them. The bids existed only in the inbox. Nobody could search them or see which general contractors sent the most work, and nothing could be automated, because there was nothing for software to read.
Bid coordinators did all of it by hand.
Step one: get the data somewhere safe
We built a way to pull every bid out of email and into a database XRQ owns. Each invitation, its documents, its due date and the GC who sent it now live in one place. It sits in XRQ's own accounts, not ours.
That step sounds boring. It's the one that matters. Once your data is in a place technology can reach, you can build on it.
- Email inbox
- Database you own
- AI agents
- Flagged bids
Step two: let agents do the reading
With the bids in one place, AI agents took over the paperwork. They check the inbox every 15 minutes, read each new ITB, pull the documents, log the bid and flag the jobs worth XRQ's time. The team decides what to bid. The agents do everything before that.
- 40,000+
- bid emails turned into searchable data
- 15 min
- from inbox to database
- $550K+
- a year in bid coordinator work, now automated
What you can do this week
- Set up one inbox just for bids, and send every ITB there.
- Put each bid into a database, even a simple one. Due date, GC, trade, link to the documents.
- Once it's there, agents can sort it, flag the good ones and remind you before bid day.
If your bids live on paper or in someone's head, no software can help. You should own your data, and technology should be able to reach it. It's time to get off paper.
Sitting on a pile like this?
Walk us through it on a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what can be automated, even if you never hire us.