Estimating Support

You're reading this at 10pm. The tender goes in Thursday. You've had operatives on site since 6am, you've dealt with a delivery issue, a programme query, and a variation argument — and now you're sitting down to price a job that your business genuinely needs to win, but that you genuinely cannot afford to lose money on.

This is the estimating reality for most Irish subcontractors. It is not a sustainable model. Pricing work when you're exhausted, under time pressure, and without structured cost data is how margins get guessed. How labour rates get undercooked. How material allowances fall short of what you actually pay when you ring your supplier in the morning. How you win a contract at a rate that made sense at 11pm but makes no commercial sense at all on site six weeks later.

After more than 40 years of estimating work across the UK, Ireland, the Middle East, and beyond — covering insulation systems, mechanical services, specialist trades, and civil packages — I've seen what underpinned the winning bids and what sank the losing ones. The difference, almost without exception, came down to the rigour of the cost build-up. Not luck. Not a sharp price. A structured, evidenced, commercially intelligent estimate.

Alumitherm provides estimating support that works the way a good estimator works. We start with the bill of quantities or scope of works and review it before we price it — identifying gaps, ambiguities, and risk items that need to be either costed or qualified out. We build labour costs from first principles: gang sizes, realistic productivity rates, shift patterns, welfare allowances. We build material costs from current market pricing — not last year's rates or a spreadsheet template you inherited from someone else.

For Irish insulation and mechanical subcontractors specifically, we understand the materials market. Kingspan Kooltherm, Armaflex, phenolic and PIR boards, mineral wool, foil-faced pipe sections — we know what these cost to buy and to install. We know the difference in labour productivity between a clean new-build mechanical room and a phased refurbishment in an occupied facility. We know what sheet metal ductwork rates look like across different scopes and what the market variation is between Dublin and regional centres. This is not generic estimating support. It's sector-specific cost intelligence built on decades of actual experience.

Our AI-assisted pricing framework allows us to process high-volume bills of quantities at speed without sacrificing accuracy. We build structured cost models that remain auditable — so when the QS comes back to you during the post-tender interview, you can defend every line. That defensibility is commercially important. It's the difference between a confident price and a nervous one.

From €149 per submission, you're accessing a level of estimating expertise that a mid-sized subcontractor would typically pay a senior estimator €50,000–€70,000 per year to have in-house — and getting it on demand, for the submissions that matter, without the overhead.

Variation costings are also handled. When a main contractor issues a change, the response needs to be structured, timely, and evidenced. A poorly prepared variation claim is money left on the table. A well-prepared one — with clear labour and material build-ups, a programming impact analysis, and a logical presentation — gets agreed faster and at a higher recovery rate.

If your business is pricing work on instinct and hope, Alumitherm brings the structure, the data, and the experience to change that.

What's Included

• Bill of quantities review and gap analysis prior to pricing
• Labour cost build-up by trade, gang size, and productivity rate
• Material cost build-up using current Irish and UK market pricing
• Prelims and site overhead allowance review
• Subcontract and supply chain cost modelling where applicable
• Risk and contingency analysis by scope section
• Variation and change order costing and narrative
• Commercial summary for internal sign-off and submission
• Post-submission support for tender interview queries
• Structured pricing template for internal reuse

Who It's For

• Irish mechanical, insulation, and specialist subcontractors pricing public or private work
• Growing businesses without dedicated in-house estimating resource
• Contractors routinely pricing work late at night or under unrealistic timeframes
• Companies that have won work recently only to find the margin wasn't there on delivery
• Businesses needing fast-turnaround variation costings on live contracts