American Steel Fabricators uses ContraVault to take up to 80%
of the work out of a bid that runs 35 to 50 hours

American Steel Fabricators is a full-service structural steel, miscellaneous metals, and ornamental provider serving New England. The company has been in business for 34 years and is an industry leader in high-definition plasma cutting.

The business was built around two connected commitments: serving its customers and supporting its employees. It also specializes in difficult work, where a stronger shop performance creates a stronger client relationship.

Principal Peter Sirois brings more than 25 years of steel-industry expertise and still estimates alongside his partner. The bidding problem he describes is one he works through himself.

A bid at American Steel takes 35 to 50 hours to generate. Much of that time is not spent judging or pricing the scope. It is spent locating the scope page by page across drawings, then reading thousands of specification pages to find the handful of clauses that change the number.

The company's experienced estimators do this work carefully, down to every nut and bolt, because that rigor produces a figure they can stand behind. But the hours divide into two unequal parts:

• The legwork of finding, reading, and organizing bid information
• The expert judgment required to price difficult structural steel work

The legwork is the larger share, yet it was being completed by the most experienced people in the business, including Mr. Sirois and his partner. That is the 80% ContraVault is designed to address.

Four connected ContraVault capabilities move the legwork forward before an experienced estimator makes a single pricing decision.

Scope identification

ContraVault goes through the drawings and pulls out the scope, removing the task that used to consume the front half of every estimate. Mr. Sirois describes this as teeing up the job so estimators reach the higher-skilled work sooner.

Estimator hold points

The platform does not run silently and return an unchecked result. It pauses on potential scope items and asks the estimator to confirm whether each one should be priced. Those yes-or-no hold points make the output trustworthy enough to build on.

Organized scope spreadsheet

Confirmed scope lands in an organized spreadsheet. Estimators no longer have to flip repeatedly through drawings to find information they have already reviewed.

Specification digest and Go/No-Go analysis

ContraVault paraphrases thousands of specification pages and links each finding back to the source so the estimator can verify it. Go/No-Go analysis runs alongside this workflow, helping the team assess a bid before committing the estimating hours.

Put together, the scope is located, confirmed, and organized, while the specifications are distilled into what matters. The estimator reaches the judgment-intensive work sooner.

Mr. Sirois estimates that ContraVault can clear up to 80% of the work out of the way on the right job, leaving the estimator to apply the final finishing touches. Across bids generally, he estimates the figure at 60% to 70%.

• Bid effort: up to 80% of the legwork removed on the right job
• Typical estimate: 60% to 70% of the work cleared across bids generally
• Personal throughput: Mr. Sirois expects the finished program to make him twice as fast as an estimator
• Decision ownership: every pricing judgment remains with the experienced estimator

These figures are Mr. Sirois's estimates from partway through implementation, not measured results. What is already true is that ContraVault moves the legwork off experienced estimators' desks and into a reviewable, source-linked workflow.

In Mr. Sirois's words: "I don't want the AI to do the thinking for us. I want it to do the legwork so that we can do the thinking faster."