PLANPOINT
Moving Forward with PlanPoint
Easy information access for CARM members
By Deb Draper
Over 125 years ago, 14 construction companies gathered
around a table in Brandon to discuss concerns about
their industry. This original networking organization
became CARM – now 200 members strong and still
dedicated to sharing information for the benefit of all.
The planroom is at the centre of this vital service and continues to
find ways to bring more value to CARM membership, most recently
with the launch of the online PlanPoint platform in February of
this year.
Many advantages to PlanPoint
With 24-hour access, members can easily log into the system and
have a wealth of information at their fingertips. The dashboard dis-plays
open projects, new projects entered in the last 24 hours, the
user’s interested open projects and all the alerts for those projects, as
well as a map of the open projects.
“Another feature is that members can select a radius from their
home base that will appear on the dashboard map so they can easily
see those projects that fall within their radius,” said Kendra Haigh,
project coordinator at CARM. “Also, they can select the divisions
they’re interested in and/or those applicable to their business. Once
they select the radius and divisions, the system will recommend proj-ects
that fall within those criteria. We source from about 10 different
sites, so members don’t need to buy separate memberships to get
the information.”
Haigh says members receive a daily email notifying them of new
projects, projects closing soon and bid and award results that have
been processed. If a member chooses to subscribe to follow a project,
this will be displayed on the “interested proponents” list and they will
receive notification whenever the planroom processes addendums
for that project.
“We have three different levels of membership and PlanPoint is
our highest level, giving access to online projects, discounted print-ing
and scanning prices, and much more. We do a lot of the heavy
lifting, finding the majority of projects, every project they might have
an interest in. We try to be very diligent about closing out on projects
as we feel it brings value to our members to see the project through to
the award stage. Sometimes this becomes a bit time-consuming for us
to find all the information, but we feel it is important.”
Easy to use for everyone
PlanPoint is easy to use, no matter a person’s experience level with
computers. The planroom provides training to new users to intro-duce
them to the platform, how to use and take advantage of the
features, either in person, in the office or over the phone. It takes
about 15 minutes to go through everything and then the member is
ready to go.
Haigh said, “It is not only user-friendly for the members, but also
on the administrator side. We can easily go in and enter the data, or
change a project with an addendum. This really speeds up our pro-cess
so we can get the information out to the members faster.”
Coming out from under COVID-19
Around mid-March, with the arrival of COVID-19, the planroom
saw a substantial decrease in the number of projects being issued
and at the same time, a large number of projects being cancelled.
“Mandatory site meetings weren’t being held, and a lot of members
like to attend even the non-mandatory site meetings and couldn’t do
that. Normally May/June is pretty consistent with a large number of
projects getting tenders out there. However, it wasn’t until the end of
August that we began to see a more consistent increase in projects,
mostly double-digit numbers every day.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF CARM
The PlanPoint Dashboard
BUILDING RURAL MANITOBA | 11