FastPIPE is a construction and estimation software offering from FastEST, Inc.
N/A
monday.com
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
It's absolutely well suited to anyone needing accurate piping takeoff and laboring estimates, with great reporting and up to date pricing. I love that I didn't need to spend time trying to update the price logs. It's easy to learn, and works well in a large or small environment, and lends itself to more than just estimating, but becomes a good project management tool as well. Fantastic software.
Prior to monday.com, we were using Trello as our team task management tool. What monday.com has allowed us to do is to easily create sub levels to tasks, create multiple stages for each task and to easily assign people to different tasks in a way that is visually appealing and easy to understand.
FastPIPE was very fast to learn, very straight forward and user-friendly. It's easy to use and teach new interns and project engineers how to quickly takeoff sections to backup change orders or assist in heavy bid load.
It's fantastic at keeping up to date on price changes. I'd get updates often, and they were usually within 2-3% of our discount prices with local vendors. In the few instances it wasn't, FastPIPE was very easy to adjust or factor for project costs.
Is great at being able to pull up reports and graphs and track different materials and labor costs for factoring. We bid on a lot of high rise residential buildings, so we do takeoff by floor. It would give detailed reports per page as opposed to just a lump sum. Very detailed so it was easy to adjust per our project approach.
Automation/integrations - Choosing from template automation or creating your own, integrate across platforms.
Dashboards - Different views i.e. kanban, gantt chart, tables, forms.
All info in one place - Add all of the necessary files for each task inside of Monday; don't need to go looking for ages in different folders on our internal system, add comments, and add assignees to each task—very content-rich way of presenting information.
It was a trick or two learning how to upload prints correctly, I think that interface could be a bit easier, but it's already better than most of the competition.
Might be nice to have easier labor factoring, in case we want to pre-load our own instead of MCA time factors for piping labor
It would auto update upon opening occasionally. It's fairly fast, but I prefer to OK that in case I just need to come up with something quickly and don't want to wait.
Ensuring I have set up a Private board vs public board is not clear - it would be useful to have an additional alert when creating a board as I work with sensitive information. It will eventually be used in a team based environment but while I test the boards, they needs to be private.
Time tracking is clumsy, could be easier to record
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
On the surface, monday.com looks easy to use - it is indeed easier to use than almost all competing products. (There is one exception where they are on par.) But, I've come across so many organisations that start well with monday.com and then struggle because of the disorganised mess that is created. You have to have clear frameworks *before* you adopt monday.com as the ones that come out of the box are too simplistic for the average organisation. Otherwise, you need a system owner internally who can guide and help the organisation with monday.com adoption. At our organisation we have both.
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
I used this capability last week for the first time and scheduled a call. Michael was so helpful. He listened to what I was wanting to accomplish and got back to me within a few hours with a screen recording of different options. I had one question on one of the options and when I replied, I got a new person that wanted to set up a call. I declined because that would be like starting all the way over with what I'm wanting and what he presented to me. I think if we have follow-up questions, we should be able to ask them to the same person we just worked with.
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
I've used the quote soft piping takeoff as well, and it's just not as easy to use or update. Basic methodology and interaface is similar, but it's more 'clunky' to use, is harder to keep updated and to upload PDF's for takeoff, and it's just not as streamlined or user friendly. Akin to comparing driving a truck to a sports car. The Fast Pipe is really smooth and easy to function in.
Airtable served us well for data management. However, our senior management told us Project Managers we would no longer be using Airtable. monday.com serves us well with project management AND light-weight database usage. Workfront served we Project Managers very well. However, Workfront was never going to be accepted by our non-Project Managers for managing their projects. monday.com's ease of use and colorful UI build adoption among our non-PMs
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
Best impact is time saved. It's so much faster to do bid takeoff and hit the ground running
Being able to 'draw in' on design-build and being able to print my takeoff has been helpful when turning the job over so the field install understands the approach taken to get the job.
Ease of use and learning has made it much more cost effective to bring new people up to speed.
My favourite example? We used it to take a failed start-up, one where the prime investor was considering pulling out - to being a listed business (EURONEXT) within 18 months. That business now has a market cap at around $200m.
Turnaround of a struggling health tech venture that was buried under endless spreadsheets by its investors - from loss-making to £2M EBITDA in two -years.
Offshoring - Through the adoption of Monday as a key workstream management tool (moving off JIRA) we were able to reduce resource costs by over £2m per annum, without any change in efficiency or quality.
