CostWorks is used across our multi-discipline firm to give us and our clients a good handle on construction costs for our new design and renovation projects. The user must be careful when it comes to markup factors such as City Cost indexes, overhead, and profit markups since they will vary from project to project and greatly affect the overall cost of construction.
Pros
unit costs of construction materials
labor rates for large projects
Cons
small project costs where labor is a bigger portion than materials on cost
markup factors on governmental projects
Likelihood to Recommend
Well Suited: Construction cost estimates for new larger projects where the construction will start within the next 6-9 months. Budgetary estimates for future buildings through its square foot models.
Not Well Suited: Not accurate enough on small projects where labor, travel to sites, and OH&P are a higher percentage of unit costs than on larger projects where these costs are spread out across more units.
In my previous position as Eastern Regional Estimating Manager of Design for Jacobs Engineering, I used CostWorks to develop models for preliminary task orders and to develop ROMs for the building of the 1391 documents used by many federal government entities. I also used CostWorks to validate current estimates that were submitted to me for review. I did this by utilizing the modeling feature in CostWorks to build a very similar facility/building in CostWorks that most closely resembled the current facility/building that I was reviewing. I then utilized the UniFormat Preliminary Cost Report to validate the cost/SF and compare it to the current estimate cost/SF for the same UniFormat line items. This allowed me to give the estimate a sanity-check and also pointed out areas that may need further investigation into their cost structure.
Pros
CostWorks is very good at generating quick and valid estimates for standardized facilities such as office buildings, schools, etc. It allows you to validate other cost estimates at the UniFormat level when doing an estimate validation.
CostWorks' database of detailed line-items is a very resourceful asset when it comes to finding a very specific line-item. Sometimes, when using Success or MII, I will have CostWorks open on the other screen so I can find an item that the other softwares just don't have and build it into the other software from the CostWorks entry.
CostWorks does a very good job of generating reports that are both well-developed and have enough detail at the summary level to be able to sit with a client or a project manager and have them follow along and understand without being overwhelmed with detail and numbers.
Cons
When I export a CostWorks project into Excel, it only hardcodes the entries and does not utilize the calculating functions of Excel. If I have to make adjustments, based on the client's request, I have to go into each hard-coded cell and build the formula that calculates that raw number.
Also when exporting to Excel, the report has to immediately be reformatted for column-width and vertical spacing that should already be part of the export script.
When building a SF model in CostWorks, sometimes there is a need to use a square footage that is outside the boundaries of CostWorks. There should be some override function that will allow you to continue without having to continually override the maximum or minimum SF entries.
Likelihood to Recommend
Again, CostWorks is very good at developing models of standard industry facilities/buildings, and it does this very accurately and efficiently. It is not a software that I would use to develop a very detailed line-item cost estimate that would possibly need several revisions to it over the course of the estimate deliverable cycle. And it would not be one I would use where the estimate needs to be broken down into phases or areas of construction. It just doesn't have these capabilities, and maybe it shouldn't. However, it is an excellent resource for running along side other estimating softwares in that its database of line-items is one of immense depth and as I stated before, I use it all the time in conjunction with my other client-specified softwares so that I can find line-items that those softwares just do not contain.
