Five-year-old construction software firm Bridgit of Waterloo, Ont. unveiled a significant new partnership recently, announcing that its workforce management software Bridgit Bench would be featured within Procore’s new construction resource platform.
Last year California-based Procore took 5th spot in Forbes’s ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world so Bridgit’s partnership with the firm is a major coup, said Sean Erjavec, Bridgit’s chief revenue officer.
“It is definitely a milestone for us,” said Erjavec. “The last number of years we have been kind of growing the business organically and now we are looking at strategic partnerships with companies like Procore. There is a decent upside for both companies.”
The deal means Bench, launched in the spring, will be available to Procore users through the American firm’s Embedded Experience platform. Erjavec said the Bench rollout has been highly successful and with 70 per cent of its new clients also Procore users, the synergy was natural.
“This will allow for tighter integration, for better operational efficiency for those clients who have been getting our tool,” explained Erjavec.
A preview video of Bench on the Bridgit website explains that contractors tracking manpower on existing projects and planning for the future can use Bench to create customized Gantt charts to determine optimal assignments, assess who is over-utilized or could handle more work, see what positions need to be filled and what levels of experience are allotted to job functions, to cite various tasks.
Clients obtain a view of how their resources are fitting in, and they can make changes on the fly and determine how to fit a new project in, the video explains.
“If Procore clients are having challenges with resource planning this is very, very complementary,” said Erjavec. “There is a win for all three sides, the clients, Procore and us.
Until recently Bridgit’s primary software was Field, which oversees field operations for construction firms, offering accountability and transparency, said Erjavec.
Field is now mature, though still very important for Bridgit, he explained, with new clients signing up monthly.
“But for us to be able to offer greater value to the market in general we did think that launching a second project into the construction vertical that has not been developed so far made sense to the business,” he said. “We have two solutions, two go-to-market strategies.”
Bench was developed through conversations with general contractors.
“We asked them, what are you doing manually, what keeps you guys up at night,” Erjavec said. “The whole concept of resource planning came about. So, we started talking to a client base, creating designs on what tools could do, we had clients provide us with spreadsheets and help us understand how they are managing their people today, and then there was an advisory group. We were building solutions from the ground up with the general contractor base.”
Bench had a soft launch in 2018 and entered the market more formally in 2019.
“Creating something from the ground up with these clients is super, super exciting, and an extension of that, marketing in Canada and the U.S., and seeing that a lot of our clients are Procore clients and being able to take Procore project data into our system, it was the perfect marriage,” he said.
Bridgit and Procore showcased Bench at the Groundbreak conference from Oct. 8 to 10 in Phoenix.
Meanwhile, back in Waterloo, Bridgit’s workforce, currently at around 50, will continue to expand. The firm founded by Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake has doubled in size in the last couple of years, Erjavec said, and it’s expected the headcount will rise by another 10 employees in the near future. Brodie remains the CEO.
“We will keep on growing,” Erjavec said. “We are growing at a steady pace and we have decent capital to grow.”
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