I’m putting together Construction Equipment’s Annual Report and Forecast for our January issue, and one of the data points raises an interesting question about the role of the asset manager. We asked subscribers across all of our company’s construction magazines what they anticipate will happen to bid prices next year.
Industries include residential building and remodeling, nonresidential building and remodeling, transportation, and water infrastructure. And, of course, Construction Equipment subscribers manage fleets across all these industries.
The fleet managers are far less optimistic about their companies being able to raise bid prices for next year than are the non-equipment managers in the individual construction markets. Across all the construction vocations, 56.5 percent of respondents anticipate bids prices to rise in 2103, compared with 43.8 of asset managers.
The question, then, is what do fleet managers know that others do not? Or, what information are fleet managers missing from within their organizations? More important to the organizations that employ asset managers, why the disconnect?
Asset managers contribute a key piece of cost data to the estimating process: equipment costs. The asset manager knows better than anyone what it will cost the company to field the equipment necessary to build the project, from site preparation to pumping concrete to laying pipe to lifting HVAC units onto the roof.
If an organization has not included the asset manager in the financial discussions surrounding its estimating process, 2013 will be an interesting year.