The first steel call on every new tower

Dylan heads estimating at a structural steel fabricator in New York. His team prices the steel for new buildings. The big jobs are won long before the tender. By the time a project reaches the papers, the general contractor already has three steel prices. Dylan’s team reads the city’s permit pages by hand, an hour each morning, and still misses half of them. With xMap Flows, Dylan built Cadence. Every weekday at six, Cadence reads the city’s new building permits, keeps the buildings of ten floors or more, finds the builder behind each one, skips the jobs already in his bid list, estimates the steel each one needs, and posts them to the estimators. This Tuesday, Cadence finds a twenty-two floor tower in Long Island City, filed the day before. The builder hears from Dylan before any other fabricator. Three weeks later, his team is pricing the steel with the drawings in hand. Dylan stopped reading about jobs he lost. Now he calls about the ones he’ll win.

The story in words