Build vs. Buy: Which Accubid Anywhere Database Approach Is Right for You?
When implementing Accubid Anywhere, contractors eventually face an important decision:
Should we build our database ourselves or start with an already-developed database?
There isn’t a universal answer, but there is a real cost on both sides.
Building Gives You Control over the process but not final output
Building internally allows a contractor to design everything around its existing standards.
Assemblies, naming, takeoff structure and workflows can all be created exactly as desired.
For companies with dedicated database personnel, substantial estimating resources and very unusual requirements, that can make sense.
Typically the end product isn’t ideal and never reaches its full potential.
But Building Isn’t Free
Database development consumes skilled labor.
And the person qualified to build a good electrical estimating database is usually someone valuable enough to be doing something else.
If development requires thousands of hours, calculate those hours using the actual cost of experienced estimating personnel.
Then include testing.
Then refinement.
Then the cost of discovering that something designed six months ago doesn’t work as expected in production.
Buying Changes the Starting Point
A developed database doesn’t mean your company can never customize anything.
It changes where you begin.
Instead of starting with an empty canvas and spending years building common electrical estimating content, you start with a developed system and adjust from there.
That’s a fundamentally different implementation strategy.
Consider Opportunity Cost
This is the piece that often gets overlooked.
If your best estimator spends 1,000 hours building a database, what else could that estimator have accomplished during those 1,000 hours?
How many projects could have been estimated?
How many opportunities were missed?
What was the value of those opportunities?
Start Where Someone Else Finished
Keystone’s Accubid Anywhere Database represents years of development, testing, estimating experience, trial and error, and continued refinement.
You could reproduce that work yourself.
The question is whether there is any business reason to start at the beginning when you can start much closer to the end.
