OnScreen Takeoff Testimonials
- Bob Theune
- General Manager
- House of Cabinetry, Inc.
“House of Cabinetry purchased OnScreen Take-Off in the fall of 2015 and immediately got slammed throughout the 4th quarter. We hadn’t been able to complete any formal training. We have only had time to scratch the surface on what the product can do, but it has already saved us a tremendous amount of time. A short story; during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the office is closed, but this year our estimator was working to get a huge bid out for one of our biggest customers. Changes came in on a bid that we had just submitted and needed to be revised prior the end of the year.
I came in to assist, in any way possible to get these two bids completed and it looked to be a daunting job. It appeared that it was going to require pulling several all-nighters. However, I remembered a feature mentioned during the demonstration that RSA Solutions did on OnScreen Take-Off that allowed you to take a bid and overlay a revision, revealing the revision changes immediately and automatically. Our estimator found a tutorial online and we used this feature to help us expedite what should have taken three days but only took us 4 hours to complete. It was phenomenal and we have shared this feature with others we collaborate with to increase their revision process as well. OST is a great software that will dramatically increase the consistency in your bidding and pricing and I cannot wait to see how it is going to transform our estimation department, further.”
“When I came on board the company had invested in OnScreen Take-Off to replace the previous hand drawn method of estimating. We have used the software successfully over the last five years and have enjoyed substantial costs savings from not printing and storing paper plans. On-Screen has also been extremely useful to our draftsmen being able to see what we have priced on a project and what needs to be drawn for Shop Drawings along with notes we can place on the drawings.
We print out highlighted floor plans for our installers from On-Screen to enable them to locate the areas on a job site much easier. The speed & ease of using the “hot link” button to jump from elevations to the plan view is one of the most useful features of the product for our staff. We are very happy with OnScreen Take-Off, and it keeps our full-time take-off & estimator and our two product managers easily on the same page, which increases our productivity. On-Screen is used in the estimating, project management, and installation phases of our business.”
- Mike Turner
- Project Manager
- Dyer Industries
- Empire, AL
- Kent Swinson Timberline
- Cabinetry & Millworks
- Manhattan, KS
“I want to thank RSA for introducing us to OnScreen Takeoff and express our delight with the program. Prior to implementing OnScreen Takeoff, we were creating takeoffs on paper plans manually. This process involved extensive / expensive printing, plotting of plan sets and frequent shipments of plans. Not only to and from plan room services with the associated shipping expenses as well as the plan deposits that are frequently required. This amounted to a substantial amount of expense each month just for the opportunity to bid projects, most of which don’t result in a contract. In addition to the hassle of printing, shipping and marking up the plans to account for takeoff items it was a slow and inexact process. All of these issues resulted in a rather slow and often times inexact takeoff procedure.
With the implementation of OnScreen Takeoff, ALL of the printing expense is gone and ALL of the costly plan shipping expense is gone. Sometimes we must pay to have a CD sent to us, but this expense is minimal compared to shipping a roll of plans. Most of the projects we bid have plans that can be downloaded via the internet for no cost. An added bonus is that we no longer have to deal with the mountains of paper plans sitting around.
The actual process of creating the takeoff is significantly faster as well. It is an amazingly fast process to place various types of cabinet and accessory products (counted by OST as individual items), layout counter tops in the exact area covered (counted by OST as square footage), as well as standing and running trim (counted by OST as lineal footage) around the plan and elevation views of the architectural drawings. Having the various takeoff conditions shown as colored markings makes it perfectly clear what items have been accounted for and which items have been missed. OnScreen Takeoff keeps a running total of each of the types of conditions placed in the project and allows us have access to accurate counts at any time.
Once the takeoff is complete, we export these totals straight into Microvellum which has products in the library which correspond directly with the takeoff items exported from OnScreen Takeoff. Now we have all of the information necessary to calculate EXACTLY how much material is going to be required for a project and EXACTLY how much labor is going to be required to produce these products. We can bid projects with confidence knowing that we haven’t overlooked items and that our out of pocket costs are covered precisely.
Bottom line, OnScreen Takeoff has saved us thousands of dollars in plan related expenses and tremendously improved the speed of our takeoff and estimating process, allowing us to bid two or three times more projects in the same amount of time all the while greatly improving the accuracy and completeness of our bids. OST has been a tremendous blessing and I would heartily recommend it to anyone needing to create takeoffs of project plans.”
“I have an architectural millwork business that does about $9 million/year in sales. To reach that goal, we need to estimate about $70 million/year in today’s market. We were spending almost $1,000/per month in reproduction costs, as the cost of plans has been shifted from the owner and architect to the subcontractor over the last few years. We heard about on screen estimating and investigated 5 programs. We found that OnScreen Takeoff best met our needs and we purchased two seats about 3 months ago. After owning the program for 3 weeks we added a third seat.
Our reproduction costs have dropped to near zero, so the program will pay for itself in about 6 months.
We were using the program right out of the box with no training, and with each training session or skills have increased and the usefulness of the program has doubled. We have only done about half of the training and there are whole areas of the program we haven’t explored yet, but the speed and accuracy of our estimating has improved dramatically.
The training has been good and tech support has been good.I recommend this program to anyone estimating woodwork and general construction projects. In addition to being a valuable tool and a money saver, it has made estimating fun again”.
- Rick Thaler
- OGB Architectural Millwork
- Albuquerque, NM
- Jonathan Adams
- Systems Administrator
- Adams Group
- Punta Gorda, FL
“Before On-Screen Takeoff, we printed all of our plans in house on an HP plotter. This process required our project assistants to sort through the plans and extract only the necessary sheets for our scope of work. This was a time consuming process and often times the plotter was backed up because we were printing so many sheets…it simply could not keep up with our volume. Not to mention, we were spending approximately $6k – $8k a year in just printing supplies.
Since deploying On-Screen takeoff, we no longer sort through the plans. We simply upload all of the sheets and the estimators utilize which ones they need. We can easily and quickly upload plans for a fast track estimate whereas in the past we had to wait for the plotter to print them out. We have greatly reduced our printing supplies (we still print out the plans on projects we’ve been awarded) and we are able to complete more bids.
Simply put, we are able crank out more estimates while reducing our costs. While we haven’t calculated any hard facts, we are confident that On-Screen Takeoff paid for itself in the first six months of use. We could not imagine ever going back to our antiquated way of estimating!”