Ali’i Builders.
One workspace now runs bidding for a Big Island general contractor, from the moment a subcontractor’s PDF lands to the moment the schedule of values goes out.
Estimating ran on inboxes and memory.
Ali’i Builders is a general contractor in Kona running high-end residential and commercial work with a small team and dozens of local subs. Bids arrived as PDFs in every format imaginable. Leveling them against each other, building the schedule of values, and producing a client-ready estimate were separate manual exercises — measured in weeks, repeated on every project.
One system, five rooms.
We built a single bidding workspace shaped around how a GC actually buys a job. Each step of the cycle gets its own room, and they all share one record per bid:
Bid Board
Drop a subcontractor’s bid PDF — or forward it to the project’s ingest address — and it comes back structured: price, alternates, inclusions, exclusions flagged by risk, and lead times, sorted into its CSI division.
Leveling
Competing bids sit side by side within each division. Scope gaps and exclusion differences surface automatically, so a low number with a hole in it stops looking like a win.
Schedule of Values
Selecting a vendor writes the SOV line items itself, on real cost codes, with cascading markups and Hawaii’s general excise tax applied exactly where it belongs.
Estimates
A plan set goes in and a branded, client-ready cost estimate comes out — quantities by division, labor, schedule, risk register, and a low–mid–high range, as a finished PDF.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw installed for the team, with a purpose-built estimating skill: a senior chief estimator that reads the full plan set and writes the estimate straight into the workspace.
How we built it.
The workspace is a Next.js application organized one screen per project. Bid documents are parsed into structured records the whole board reads from, so the comparison, the selection, and the SOV can never disagree. Estimating runs on OpenClaw, installed for the team with a purpose-built skill: a senior chief estimator that confirms every sheet of the plan set, raises ambiguities as RFIs, performs the quantity takeoff by CSI division with waste factors and Hawaii location factors, prices unit costs in low–mid–high bands, and writes the estimate straight into the workspace as a formatted report, not a spreadsheet. Lead times feed a procurement timeline, so a twelve-week factory plenum gets flagged as critical path before it becomes a surprise.
Results.
Forty-two subcontractor bids parsed, leveled, and selected on one board; a schedule of values that writes itself from those selections; and full-project estimates — a $2.4M four-plex and an $8.5M rural health clinic — delivered as client-ready documents in hours instead of weeks. The estimator reads the business from one screen, then goes back to building.
Download the project brief (PDF) →