New England Engineering Firm conducting survey about plans & specs (paper or CD-ROM or both?)

New England Engineering firm, Wright-Pierce, issues survey to General Contractors, Sub-Contractors, and Material Suppliers (Plans and Specs on CD-ROM?)

This large, progressive, regional engineering firm (Wright-Pierce) is in the process of conducting a survey of GC’s, Subs and Material Suppliers. I’ll get back to that in just a minute.

Wright-Pierce office locations:

· Middletown, CT

· Providence, RI

· Andover, MA

· Sandwich, MA

· Topsham, ME

· Portland, ME

· Portsmouth, NH

· Henniker, NH

If you go to Wright-Pierce’s web-site and click on the “projects to bid” tab, that will bring up a list of engineering projects W-P is currently requesting bids for.

Here’s one of the “project” pages that came up, after I visited the “projects to bid” page and selected an individual project.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B81al4kFAU9JODE1YTRmYjAtMzExZi00NDliLWJiMmQtODBmYmRlOGM3MTky&hl=en_US

So, if a contractor or sub or material supplier wants to bid, the prospective bidder can place an order for “plans and specs” (PRINTED plans and specs.) W-P lists the cost to purchase a set of plans and specs (for each project out to bid) and also lists the shipping cost. I don’t have any idea who does the printing; could be that the printing is done “in-house” by W-P (either on equipment owned by W-P or on equipment provided by a vendor under an “FM” arrangement) or done by a reprographer, off-site, who’s handling W-P’s off-site reprographics work on an “outsource” basis. The point I’m making, here, is that, up until now, W-P has been “hard-copy” printing bid sets.

That “standard procedure” may change, somewhat, after W-P evaluates the results of the survey it is conducting. Here’s the survey, take a look:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B81al4kFAU9JNzI0ZThhY2UtMDViOS00MWNiLWIzOWYtMTg2M2MwOGUxMzE3&hl=en_US

In the future, it is likely that some of the GC’s and Subs will want to receive plans and specs on CD-ROM instead of in hard-copy format. Or, maybe they’ll want both!