Project Procurement Software for Engineering and Construction
4castplus Procurement has been specifically designed to manage the heavy demands of construction projects. With its powerful and easy-to-use features, you can eliminate the struggles of connecting your procurement activity with your projects. All purchase order items are linked directly with the work breakdown structure and accounting cost codes to ensure accurate project reporting.
Productivity and Visibility
4castplus Procurement is intelligently designed to connect your project teams together in a collaborative environment – an environment where data is seamlessly interconnected.
Bring together Engineering with Project Controls, Accounting and Procurement: everyone has deep visibility into every stage and status of all contract items and activities. Many productivity-enhancing features empower small teams to do the work of large teams.
Key Features
Purchase Order Management
4castplus has a controlled and clean system for creating and committing purchase orders. It’s packed with features to efficiently create, commit, track and manage purchase order contracts. Efficiency is key – there are many built-in intelligence features to make the buyer’s life easy and productive. Full contract terms, shipping, expediting instructions, technical information, documents, invoicing and much much more are all nicely organized and configurable. Click here for more on Purchase Order Management.
Procurement Dashboard and Drilldown Reporting
The 4castplus Procurement Dashboard has a wealth of rich reporting and charts to provide instant details on the health and status of the project procurement plan, progress, cost, vendors and accruals. You can even build custom report templates to suit your exact reporting needs.
Request For Quote, Request for Proposal and Bid Management
The 4castplus Request For Quote system provides an easy and organized solution for purchasers to manage the documents, communication and evaluation involved with tendering vendor bids. All contract terms, technical information, shipping, bidding instructions, documents and other attachments can be pre-configured for quick drop-down selection when preparing the contract. Awarding a Request for Quote can be done in a click of a button. Smart and Simple.
4castplus has a built-in RFQ Vendor Portal for centralized and collaborative management of vendor bids. Click here to learn more about the RFQ Vendor Portal.
Purchase Requisitions
Create purchase requisitions as a controlled and approved list of resources required on a project. For example, a Bill of Materials, BOQ, Material Requisition, etc. Buyers can smoothly move items onto RFQs or Purchase Orders from the Purchase Requisitions. The purchase requisition items can be split into sub-allocations for granular movement onto multiple RFQs and purchase orders.
Purchase Order Receiving
4castplus provides an easy way to receive goods or enter work progress as it is completed. Items are received against purchase order quantities to ensure strict controls on what and how much is received. Productivity tools to receive partial or receive all are built-in to help the process of receiving large amounts of goods. Project incurred costs are recognized on receive for critical accrual reporting. No more waiting for the vendor invoice to see the true cost to a project. Read more on Receiving and Vendor Invoice Matching here.
Expediting
Expediting equipment and materials is a vital part of large-project procurement. 4castplus has a robust and comprehensive system for tracking, recording and reporting on the timely delivery of critical-path items. Click here to read more on 4castplus expediting.
Integration Between Estimating and Procurement
Improve data integrity and save valuable time. You can streamline and simplify the procurement process by routing detail estimate items or take-offs directly to procurement. 4castplus will take care of easily making the connection between estimating and procurement. All the materials, equipment and services you may specify as part of your estimate (or budget) can be selected for a purchase requisition to be shared into the procurement module.
More Features of 4castplus Procurement
Vendor Invoice Matching and Approval
Streamline your Accounts Payable by approving vendor invoices right in 4castplus. Adjustments can be recorded for any item. 4castplus keeps track of how much has been committed, incurred and invoiced so as to quickly report on total Accruals to date.
One-Click Procurement Reporting
With all the data that is continuously collected by 4castplus procurement and tracking, the reporting of all this information actually becomes the easy part. There are a number of quick reports that are available throughout that are both interactive and available to be printed. Get a quick view of total accruals at both a summary and detail level. Group and fine-tune reports to isolate information by a variety of parameters from change orders to vendor to overages, adjustments or resource type.
Tie-in with Cost Controls
Built-in ties with the 4castplus project cost controls features brings a holistic and integrated view of procurement information. Items added to procurement can be automatically validated against predefined company cost codes. This guarantees that all procured items are associated with the correct budget area.
Incurred costs from purchase orders are used as the actuals on EVM calculations and any variance that needs to be adjusted can be moved and transferred using a 4castplus budget or contingency transfers. Time-phased resource reports show the total cost timeline by discipline, resource, or any cost code – played out over time.
Purchase Order Revisions
Purchase orders in 4castplus can be created and issued to the vendors; and subsequently revised later on to add, remove or modify any part of the contract. Each revision is tracked, received and reported on with full transparency.
Multi Currency Support
4castplus manages multi-currency for Purchase Orders and Requests for Quote. Foreign exchange rates can be custom set, and adjustments can be made at invoicing to accommodate for fluctuations in Fx rates between time of commitment and time of invoice. Base currency can be set at the company level, project level and again at the contract level for flexible currency management.
Resource Libraries
4castplus has built-in Materials, Equipment, Labor and Vendor databases to consolidate all the resources utilized on current, past and future projects. Materials management, equipment fleet management, procurement, estimating and benchmark reporting are all brought together into the same place for structure and control. Read more…
Closed-loop tie-in with Work Breakdown Structure, Cost Breakdown Structure and Schedule
Everything in 4castplus ties back to the work breakdown structure and accounting cost codes of the project. This includes all purchase orders, commitment items, purchase requisitions, RFQs, invoices, etc. The WBS and CBS become the organizational structure to link together the many features available in 4castplus.
Further Reading
Related Blogs
- Project Procurement is key to Project Controls
- Procurement is the lifeblood of your project
- Respect for the Expeditors
- Why Intelligent Workflows are so Important
- What is the difference between RFQ, RFP and Invitation to Tender
- Managing Request For Quote Bid Evaluations
- Keeping Track of Vendor Accruals
- Purchase Order 3-Way Match
- The 4castplus Accounts Payable Automation Module