A housing market plunge. A miserable lending climate. Project delays or outright cancellations. Builders going bankrupt. Let’s face it: The construction industry could use any help it can get after this most recent, revenue-crippling recession. While the home sales numbers are showing signs of turning around, it’s unclear whether it’s because of the economy, or because of government-based support programs such as $8,000 incentives for first-time home buyers.

Which means the potential for many more months of struggle is still very real, as unemployment remains high in the construction sector. The upshot is that contractors need to do more with less — an unfortunate scenario that involves bidding a greater number of estimates to get the same amount of work as they did in the past. And bidding can be a labor-intensive, tedious task, given the extensive specs and attention to detail that’s needed to come up with a winning proposal. If you’re a contractor with multiple subcontractors spread throughout a state or region, sending and resending bid notifications, details and blueprints via overnight mailings can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

But thanks to College Station, Texas-based SmartBidNet, assembling a bid is getting more and more streamlined. The company’s Web-based software package allows contractors to create a database of subcontractors that may be organized in a variety of ways — where they’re located, their level of skills, their federal minority status, their bid participation levels and even a "report card" on their general performance track record. All of this information is then processed and analyzed to rapidly produce a hopefully winning bid. The product also allows for electronically based bid submission, so lead construction contractors don’t have to spend those extra hours on printing, shipping and other traditional logistical needs to get the bid to the potential customer.

Results are already emerging: Bid turnaround time has been greatly reduced, from weeks to days for SmartBidNet customers and much if not all paperwork is eliminated. One user reports that his company saved almost $30,000 in printing and shipping costs alone. It’s especially helpful for contractors who oversee thousands of subcontractors in multiple locations nationwide. At any given time, contractors using the product can have as many as 50,000 subcontractors in their "available for work" database.

“These contractors don’t have the time or the staffing for the many bids they need to be preparing simultaneously in order to win enough jobs to stay afloat,” says James Benham, developer of SmartBidNet. Benham is also founder and president of JBKnowledge, a product design/development company also based in College Station. “If you bid more, you can win more. It’s a numbers game.”