Originally known as Bid2Win when it was founded in the 1990s, B2W has evolved from a field tracking and estimating tool to a cloud platform for heavy civil contractors that includes equipment maintenance and management, scheduling and forms electronics in your tool list. Acquired in 2022 by Trimble, B2W has been further integrated into the company’s cloud-based Trimble Connect software suite and its single sign-on service, Trimble Construction One.
“We need to do some things around single sign-on, [but] we have all the capable software [using] the Trimble ID,” says Bob Brown, president and COO of B2W. “We had to modify our licensing model to theirs. Now, we can fit into the Trimble Construction One strategy and take advantage of other applications receiving information “.
B2W’s platform was designed for heavy contractors so they don’t have to spend extra time chasing employee hours, checking bids and estimates, and notifying colleagues of needed repairs or maintenance. As the platform evolved, it helped combine field and estimate information with resource planning.
“We’ve been using their estimating program for almost 25 years, but when they created a field reporting system (basically, the input to that system comes from the estimate), then we could pull together the resources, the rates of production, whatever you feel is necessary to do the job to build the job,” says Rich King, chief financial officer of Brandon, Pennsylvania-based Schlouch Inc. “B2W has this estimate and field information.”
Although B2W’s platform is cloud-based, they’ve also introduced an app that can send information to it from a mobile device.
“We’ve introduced a field worker application designed for those individuals who don’t have a crew leader on site,” says Jon Fingland, vice president and category manager for Trimble. “It can be an independent truck driver or just an excavator operator working in a pit.”
Fingland says the app can upload hours worked, cubic yards moved and any other metrics needed directly into the B2W platform to track performance.
Tom Garrett, Kubricky Construction’s vice president of engineering, says tracking statistics have helped his bottom line.
“We’ve told our guys that they have to have a cost code when they enter their time,” he says. “People inevitably forget and some just make up a number because they knew they had to have a number. Having that [automatically] poblated has saved hours of going back and finding this information.”
