Liffey Developments (Dublin) Ltd using ConQuest software

Liffey Developments mainly carry out Civil Engineering & Infrastructure Works, working on both residential and commercial projects with a value of anything from £5,000 to £10M.

Paul Jameson has worked at Liffey Developments for nearly 17 years and has used ConQuest since it was implemented seven years ago. Paul has a varied role at Liffey as each surveyor is normally responsible for estimating projects and then managing them once they are won.

Paul told us why they chose ConQuest: “We work a bit differently at Liffey so we needed a package that was as good for the estimating as it was for the post tender work. You can hand the job over to surveyors to do valuations and all the information is there.

“We know the views that have been taken at tender level and all the rates that we have in. We would also be procurement as well so we need the rates for everything.

“We had a look at a lot of systems; most were predominantly estimating but the transition from estimating to surveying in ConQuest is excellent.

“It is user friendly; we can easily breakdown every rate to check and compare them. We have default rates in from the ‘Liffey Library’ and we adjust them accordingly. It is very, very user friendly.”

When people
 talk about a 
system being user
friendly this often
 boils down to the system
being flexible and stable.
 ConQuest is used by so much
 of the industry that it has to be.

We asked Paul about the support he receives from ConQuest: “Every time we call, the problem is resolved. The support team always ring back quickly and it is normally a query rather than a technical problem.”

This highlights that ConQuest is very stable. We find that the majority of support calls we receive are questions asking how to do this or that rather than a technical problem. Having a stable system allows us to keep our customers happy and spend more time listening to how we can improve and develop the product. After over a quarter of a century, there aren’t many things that haven’t been covered.

One other point that Paul was keen to highlight was the advantage of using ConQuest for their supply chain, in the main the PQS practices they use and the ease in which Excel bills can be imported into ConQuest: “PQS firms like that we can just send them the job and they can then send it back to us; it goes straight
back intoConQuest.
 We know we are giving them better information than the companies we are pricing against if they don’t have ConQuest.

“When we first got ConQuest, we used your service for importing bills for us. Now we know how to do it ourselves, we are a dab hand at it; we have it off to tee. We can get a 150 page bill into ConQuest in an hour.”