Coastal Construction’s Miami Office Saves ~$1 Million in First Year Using Togal.AI

• 14.5 hours saved per plan set
• ~$1M saved in first year
• Estimating time cut 50% to 10%

Coastal Construction's Miami office needed a way to free its estimators from hours of manually tracing plan sets so they could focus on higher-value work like scoping, value engineering, and identifying trade partners. Togal.AI's deep-learning platform automatically detects, labels, and measures spaces, walls, and objects within seconds, and continues to improve as it analyzes more of Coastal's historical drawings.

The cloud-based platform let multiple estimators work on the same project simultaneously, eliminating the time previously spent uploading large plan sets back and forth, and it worked across any internet-connected device with support for PDF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG drawing formats. That accessibility, combined with an intuitive interface that shortened onboarding, made it easy for the team to adopt.

Coastal Construction's Miami office estimating team of eight faced a workload problem common across the industry: manual takeoffs are slow and repetitive. Spending roughly half their time tracing lines on plan sets left estimators with far less time for higher-value work like scoping, value engineering, and identifying trade partners.

Because projects are revised continuously, with price changes and design updates arriving throughout a job's lifecycle, estimates needed near-constant rework. That manual burden also capped how many bids the Miami office could take on in a given month, limiting the amount of new work the team could pursue.

Before adopting Togal.AI, Coastal's eight-person Miami estimating team performed takeoffs using on-premise software, manually tracing, clicking, and dragging lines across plan sets to measure quantities. That manual process consumed about 50 percent of each estimator's time, consistent with an industry-wide standard of roughly 20 hours per week spent clicking through plans to analyze them. Estimates also required continual rework as revisions and price changes came in throughout a project's lifecycle.

With Togal.AI, Coastal saved 14.5 hours per plan set with the use of automated takeoff, automated naming, sharing, uploading, and collaboration features. They averaged 10 bids per month. That's 1,160 hours per month, or 13,920 hours per year.

Those 13,920 annual hours translated into roughly $1 million in first-year savings for the Miami office, driven largely by the estimating team's ability to take on and win more bids. Togal.AI also improved measurement accuracy from about 97 percent with manual takeoffs to 98 percent, while cutting the share of estimators' time spent on takeoffs from roughly 50 percent to 10 percent.

Togal.AI's platform continues to improve as it analyzes more of Coastal's historical project drawings, and works across any internet-connected device with support for PDF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG file formats. Coastal's Miami estimators can now devote more of their time to scoping, value engineering, and identifying trade partners instead of manual takeoffs.