40%
15–25%
48 hrs
Manual Steel Takeoffs Create Expensive Bidding Problems
Most fabrication companies still rely on manual quantity take-off services performed from PDF drawings during competitive bidding. The process is time-consuming, repetitive, and hard to control when multiple revised drawing packages arrive close to tender deadlines.
Even experienced structural steel estimators can miss framing changes buried across dozens of sheets — particularly on large industrial or commercial projects with repetitive members, dense connection areas, or late-arriving miscellaneous steel packages. The result is missed quantities, inaccurate material summaries, over-ordering, underbidding, or hurried bid submissions that erode margin. These errors are not the result of incompetence — they are the predictable outcome of a manual process applied at volume under deadline pressure.
In Enphy’s 12+ years of delivering accurate structural steel cost estimation, quantity take-off services, and BOQs, we have seen these problems play out consistently for fabricators and contractors across the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Our answer is Tekla-based estimodeling: instead of measuring manually from PDF drawings alone, our team builds a structural steel model in Tekla Structures first — then extracts quantities directly from that model. This creates better visualization, cleaner quantity reports, and improved consistency before bid submission. When revised drawings arrive late, updates are made to the model rather than restarting the entire takeoff from scratch. The result is a more reliable, faster estimation process that gives your team greater confidence at bid submission — and reduces the risk of costly quantity errors after award.
