A mid-size tender used to take our pilot contractors around eleven working days to price. With Oplyra ERP 3.0 the same bid takes four. Here is what the release changes — and what it deliberately does not automate.
Where the eleven days went
We sat with three estimating teams for a month before writing any code. Very little of their time went on judgement. Most of it went on reading drawings, retyping quantities into a spreadsheet and hunting for what the last similar job actually cost.
The judgement — which rates to trust, where the risk sits, how hungry the company is for this particular job — took perhaps a day and a half. That was the part worth protecting. Everything around it was the part worth removing.
Nobody became a quantity surveyor to copy numbers from a PDF into a spreadsheet. The estimator should take the typing away, not the decision.
What 3.0 actually does
The estimator is one feature in the release notes, but it is really four smaller changes that only work together.
- 01Reads the bill of quantities into line itemsUpload the BOQ and drawings; Oplyra extracts quantities, units and trade codes into a draft estimate you can edit line by line.
- 02Prices from your own history, not a catalogueRates are suggested from what your company has actually paid on completed projects, adjusted for region and date — not from a generic price book.
- 03Flags the lines it is unsure aboutAnything with thin history or an unusual specification is marked for review instead of quietly priced. Surveyors start with the risky lines, not line one.
- 04Keeps every figure traceableEach suggested rate links back to the jobs it came from, so a reviewer can see why a number is what it is before signing it off.
Variation orders without the spreadsheet
Estimates used to die at contract award. In 3.0 the approved estimate becomes the baseline for the project, and every variation order is raised against it — so the cost impact of a change is visible the moment it is logged, not at the monthly reconciliation.
Site engineers raise variations from the field app, commercial managers price them against the original rates, and the client-facing document is generated from the same record. One source, three audiences.
- 64%
- Less time from tender receipt to priced estimate across pilot contractors.
- 4 days
- Median estimation time on mid-size bids, down from eleven.
- 100%
- Of submitted bids still signed off by a named surveyor.
What stays with the surveyor
Oplyra will not submit a bid, set a margin or decide to walk away from a tender. We tested a version that suggested margins and every pilot team switched it off within a week. They were right: margin is a commercial decision that depends on things no ledger records.
Oplyra ERP 3.0 is rolling out to existing customers over the next six weeks, with migration of historical project costs handled by our team. New customers start on 3.0 from day one.
