LEM Construction Co | eTakeoff Customer Review
Larry Laird, President: My name is Larry Laird of LEM Construction. My father started the company in 1971. LEM is a general contractor right now primarily in Houston, TX. We build water and wastewater treatment facilities. I started as a project manager and worked my way into estimating.
The old school way of takeoff was to get a set of plans and use the scale— you know, scale like this. And we did that for a long time. When I started, that was pretty tedious and there’s no real audit trail of what your takeoff is.
eTakeoff is a natural solution for us.
Hunter Howard, Estimator: Doing your takeoff is much faster with eTakeoff than with other programs we were using. If you have 20 lines on a project, we typically have two or three days’ worth of work, is now condensed to about four or five hours.
Larry: It certainly speeds things up. It’s nice. They’ve updated some of the features. They have the SnapAI product that helps select corners and snap to features on the drawings that certainly helps us.
Hunter: It can take a linear footage or an area and then produce other calculations, such as a volume calculation or a square foot calculation, that other products can’t produce.
Larry: It’s really easy to use. I would say I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to software; not a big fan of change for things like that. I know it’s necessary, but I just don’t like it. And I picked it up pretty easy.
Hunter: Calculations in eTakeoff work very much like formulas from excel so if you can write excel formulas well then you can write eTakeoff extensions well.
Larry: We’re really happy with eTakeoff. It has certainly helped us get more done and helps the younger estimators understand how we take things off. It helps standardize that process. It helps us all the way through review of bids and auditing the changes that are made and as they’re made.
eTakeoff is an excellent choice, especially if you are using the Sage estimating product, how that connects to Sage. It’s key for us and I don’t think we could use anything else. It’s just built for it.
Learn more about eTakeoff for your next takeoff and estimating project: https://etakeoff.com/