Service Centers Lead the Way for Structural Steel Standards

摘要

Metal centers serving the construction sector are under great pressure to provide better efficiency in quotes and estimates, production and turnaround,To keep overhead down and avoid the duplication of effort that inflates construction costs, service centers should be able to quote structural steel jobs without the need for a staff engineer to read and take-off drawings. One perennial problem for the metals construction industry is the lack of a standard in how requests for quotations (RFQs) are created, exchanged and managed. The potential benefits of adopting one universal standard for RFQs can be seen in the DXF standard that has enabled CAD import/export. A standard format is yet to be clear for material take-off (MTO), however.