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Hard Dollar Provides First Project Portfolio Cost and Performance Analytics for Contractors and Owners

Hard Dollar Drives Project and Operational Success with Immediate Access to Real-Time Cost and Performance Analytics Across Past, Current, and Future Projects

Hard Dollar Corporation today announced the availability of its new Project Portfolio Analytics module, designed to provide executives and construction project teams instant insight into project and corporate health, providing the ability to make better financial decisions that improve profit margins and project outcomes. Hard Dollar is the applications leader for operations management solutions that enable contractors and owners to streamline estimating and budgeting, scheduling, project execution, resource optimization and project portfolio analysis in a single system.

Hard Dollar supports the pipeline of future and current projects with critical direct insight into day-to-day operations for project teams without affecting active accounting and back-office operations.

Hard Dollar's Project Portfolio Analytics provides a single source of past, current and future project operations detail across all projects and bids. Users can customize more than 20 available analytics using a number of filters to summarize and present the requested information exactly how they want to see it, as well as leverage significant efficiencies in day-to-day operations, improve productivity, and realize an immediate impact to the company's bottom line.

"Until now, the majority of executives and construction project teams have been forced to spend countless hours searching for, aggregating and analyzing project cost and budget status," explains Alistair Clague, Hard Dollar President. "By providing a single source of real-time information, contractors will experience significant productivity gains and finally have the information at their fingertips to make more informed decisions without relying on accounting. By eliminating information lag caused by manual and historical reporting processes, contractors can reduce overhead and improve efficiency to potentially improve margins by as much as 20%."

Access to critical cost information across projects helps contractors and owners:

• Make better decisions with instant insight into critical information across all projects.
• Manage estimating and construction operations with automatic tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Eliminate hundreds of man hours spent gathering data, assembling and distributing reports.
• Continually grow the company's data warehouse and knowledge base to make all employees better decision makers.

 

"The ability to see immediate performance of all or a selection of my current projects and bids positions CSW Contractors to drastically improve operations performance by analyzing trend information that previously took a week or more to retrieve," said Robert J. Meyers, CSW Contractors, Inc. Vice President. "Using Hard Dollar's Project Portfolio Analytics module, we have already received a clear advantage over any organization that relies on manual or accounting based reporting and analysis to make decisions that cut into profits and contribute to less competitive bids."

Hard Dollar Project Portfolio Analytics includes the following customizable estimating and project operations analytics:

Cost Item Details: Forecast resource employment costs and cost trends, cost per work hour and utilization trends. Determine costs for each category, and negotiate better materials prices with insight into future costs and needs across many or all projects. Analyze trends to make better buy vs. rent decisions, and understand anticipated costs by work hour over the course of time.

Forecast Cost, Cost per Unit of Measure and Cost Breakdown Analysis: Look ahead to see anticipated costs, and costs for similar items across many projects. Determine what percentage of costs are attributable to specific cost item tags (e.g., Concrete Work), Cost Source (Plug, Detail, Quote) and Cost Segment (Direct Cost, Indirect Cost, etc)

Man and Equipment Hours, Man Hour Details, Production Hours per Unit of Measure, and Work Hours: View combined Labor and Equipment work hours for upcoming projects to help determine resource availability. Better understand production rates for similar items across many jobs

Price Breakdown: Instantly see how many jobs' combined prices are broken down to the various segments of Direct Cost, Job Overhead Costs, Business Overhead Costs, and Profit.

Productivity & Performance, Revenue & Profit: Determine the performance of your estimating team by reviewing Win/Loss percentages, number of jobs in each stage (Bidding, Awarded, Underway, etc.), and easily view overall anticipated revenue and profit company-wide or for a specific division.

Actual vs. Planned vs. Forecast Man-Hour & Equipment Hour Details and Costs: Instantly compare actual values to planned values for Costs, Man-Hours, and Equipment Hours across many projects at once. Looking forward, easily forecast total Man-Hours, Equipment Hours and costs at complete and review variance amounts and percentages relative to planned values.

Executive analytics in the Hard Dollar Project Portfolio Analytics module include:

• Backlog & Pipeline: Access a snapshot of the company's relative health, based on the pipeline of current and future work.
• Bid & Start Dates: Prioritize and schedule internal resources more effectively. Bid and start date analytics provide letting dates and forecasted project start dates.
• Win/Loss: Better understand market conditions and how they affect company objectives by viewing win rates, job award trends, revenue, revenue award trends, and number of jobs for future adjustments.
• Maximize Profit Margins: Determine the best amount of profit to add to bids based on actual award decisions made in the market.
• Forecast (Budgeted) Cost: Determine how costs have increased over time to make better informed pricing decisions on future bids, and identify which cost categories represent the greatest percentage of overall costs and potential risks.
• Actual (As-Built) Cost: Improve performance by identifying how actual costs by category have fluctuated over time, or are performing by cost category across all jobs.
• Bonding Capacity: Determine how much work can be pursued without exceeding bonding capacity by accessing percent of bonding limit achieved for all jobs, awarded jobs or potential.

Until October, 31st, the Hard Dollar Project Portfolio Analytics module is free with the purchase of one or more Client Access Licenses offered at $795 each (regularly $995). A dedicated Hard Dollar Application Server, Project Portfolio Server (on larger installations), Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3 or later, and an internet browser are required for operation.

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