Clancy Dowcra & ConQuest

Clancy Docwra is one of the UK’s leading contractors, they have been using ConQuest for over 20 years to price a variety of work from Sewers, Dirty/Clean Water, Tunnelling, Power, Roads, Highways and more. They are dealing with Framework tenders worth billions of pounds and pricing the majority from first principles, to make sure they know the bottom figure.

Louis J Walshe from the Middlesex office has used ConQuest for over 15 years. He started with Clancy Docwra on site as a QS before moving into the estimating department nearly 16 years ago.

“We have always found ConQuest to be a great estimating tool but it is always improving.

“We use ConQuest from the ground up, we need to have all the build ups there. ConQuest makes it easy, we have been building the library for our needs and we have always found it easy to do, you get an array of options and it is easy to put materials into classes and you can have as many classes as you like.

“ConQuest Q Series was a big change. We already had the market leading product with Version 7 but knew that eventually the technology in V7 would limit future development. We launched ConQuest Q Series 5 years ago and Louis talked to us about it.

“I like the amount of information you can have open, you can have the bill, notes pages, photos, the dim pad and even google maps! This is really handy for long pipelines; you can have the route in front of you on google as your pricing. You can also have drawings open within ConQuest and do your take off straight into ConQuest. With ConQuest Q you have laid foundations to be able to develop the system even further.”

Louis thinks that being able to get documents from excel into your estimating system and then back again for colleagues that don’t have access is a must.

“The thing I really like are the exports to excel, that on its own is a big plus. The surveyors are really coming on board with ConQuest now as they can get any information they want. They can also have the build ups into excel and then play around with it, utilise it and put it into a format they like.”

One of the biggest advantages of having ConQuest over a manual or Excel based pricing systems is the database behind which can save a lot of time when things need to be changed at the last minute. This was put to the test during a tender that Clancy Docwra worked on and won as a consortium with a number of other companies.

“We were pricing a framework for a large water company as a consortium but our partner companies didn’t have a set estimating package. When things were changed last minute they had to spend days and weeks changing base rates. With ConQuest, it was an action that was completed in seconds. ConQuest is ideal for negotiations or last minute work, you change one price for a resource and it updates the whole job instantly no matter where it is used.”

Obviously over the years Clancy Docwra has carried out exercises to make sure they have the best system. Louis remembers a time when they were looking at one big integrated system with an estimating module. They went to the market and had a serious look at the competition.

“We had the other suppliers in and had a look at all the other systems and ConQuest was the best, it saves the company time and money, we can submit bids quickly and it allows post tender changes to be made quickly in little or no time. It helps us and helps our clients.”

“ConQuest, it’s simple, it’s fool proof”