Likelihood to Recommend In this case, CF is the best of the 'OK so far' category in my mind. NONE of the software available today gets close to a truly effective, user friendly GUI and functionality set. I have used 7 different systems over the years, with the top 4 big names having the largest hours operating. Most have less functionality, others are severely overpriced and under featured. Still others are so complicated you need an entire IT department to implement them. Contractor Foreman does much of what it does the absolute best for the money, meaning this is probably the best value for construction management software I'm aware of. I believe I can say with confidence, that if CF does it, it strives to do it well, and continues to strive to get it better. Picking a feature or two that excels is rather pointless in a company with that outlook. THAT is a company I can get behind...
Read full review Traffic is suitable for most agencies, regardless of size. You don't need to use all of the features in order to get good results. And it can be linked to Maconomy which is useful for larger agencies. We have around 80 employees and it works great.
Read full review Pros Estimates Project management Lead management - tracking where they are in the funnel and having web lead automatically pull into the system. Read full review The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it! It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time. It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job. Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically. Read full review Cons Some of the modules like checklists and forms are confusing and hard to use some of the training videos or versions of an old outdated version of the software Would like to see a more efficent way of creating a submittal log generated from a specification book Read full review I would like to be able to colour code my clients, so I can see at a snapshot what projects staff are working on. I would like to be able to colour code staff holidays, public holidays so I can easily see what resources I have available. As an administrator, I can't see at a glance the actual time spent on a task work or comments a user has logged. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Eliminated the need for our team to log into multiple systems to do their jobs which aligns to our Lean approach
Read full review Support Rating I rarely give anyone a 9 or 10 rating for service. The main reason for this rating is Contractor Foreman's dedication to improvement. To be completely frank, CF has fallen down on their tech help with me several times, but I am an exceptionally difficult user to service as I tend to use a product up to it's limits and want more. CF has actually addressed these wants several times (after waits that seemed interminable, but were actually pretty damn fast in the reality of software development)
Read full review Alternatives Considered I've used
Buildertrend and Conconstruct near daily for a little over 10 years. They were both pretty solid. But the price kept going up without much value being added to the software. As they grew, they didn't upgrade with the growth, so the sites became slower. Contractor Forman has all the functionality of the others, and several other tools that they don't. There are several tools our company doesn't even use yet that look great. It's not perfect, and the learning curve due to its increased capability is a bit of a challenge. But overall, it is superior in every way that mattered to us, and more affordable.
Read full review Deltek TrafficLIVE was the pre-existing system when I joined the company. When we decided to purchase a new system, we considered a number of options such as
Kimble PSA, Oracle NetSuite & Mavenlink. We decided to go ahead with
Kimble PSA because we felt that as a package, it provided all the functionality we need against its competitors. It had far more functionality than TrafficLIVE and was more suited to the scale of our business.
Read full review Return on Investment We don't have to double enter our job information anymore (estimates, bills, labor hours) to show employees what they need to see. Specific access within Contractor Foreman does that for us. It's taken us longer to learn how Contractor Foreman works within itself than we thought it would, so implementation is taking a little longer than ideal. However, we have been learning a lot along the way about the easiest ways to use the workflow that Contractor Foreman has. Read full review Much more clarity as to how much time each different type of brief should take to complete as we can back reference as to how long it took last season. It has lead to better customer service. We can visibly demonstrate where we are with jobs and who has been assigned. In the past verbally confirming the different stages did not always convince the project leaders that they were being given the actual real time. From the Studio users point of view it has empowered them to manage their time more efficiently. If they receive a request to move onto another job their calendars can be reviewed to see if they are available or not. Read full review ScreenShots Contractor Foreman Screenshots Deltek TrafficLIVE Screenshots