You bid the equipment number. How long before you know whether it was right?
Labor comes back daily, coded to the activity, so the next estimate is sharper than the last one. Equipment does not. It goes into the bid as an allowance, then a machine sits on that job for months, accruing cost that arrives as a period total spread by a rule. Nobody can point at a structure and say what the machine on it actually cost. So the same allowance goes into the next bid.
ENR named Burns & McDonnell its Texas and Louisiana Design Firm of the Year in June 2026, on record regional revenue above one billion dollars. New EPC leadership arrived this year to expand into LNG, mining, and critical minerals. Three sectors where nobody at the firm has an equipment actual to bid from yet.Pricing a new sector is hard enough. Pricing it without equipment actuals from the last one is harder.
Turner, Mortenson, and Swinerton run their equipment operations on RentalResult.
See where Burns & McDonnell stands5 minutes, results on screen immediately. No cost, no demo, no follow-up sequence.
Five reasons the equipment number
never comes back.
None of these is anyone estimating badly. Each one is a reason the cost that comes back cannot be used to sharpen the number that goes out.
You bid a number per unit. What comes back is one total. The estimate carries an equipment allowance per structure or per mile. The actual arrives as a period cost spread across the whole job. Neither is wrong, and neither can be laid against the other.
The rate charging the job is not the rate you priced. Estimates assume a duration. If the system only holds one flat rate, work priced monthly gets charged daily, or the reverse. The variance then describes the rate structure rather than how the crew performed.
You cannot tell whether owning it beat renting it. Third-party rental shows up as an invoice. Owned equipment shows up as whatever internal rate got applied. Putting the two side by side on the same scope of work takes a project, so mostly nobody does.
Nobody charges downtime to the machine that caused it. A unit fails, a crew stands, the schedule takes the hit. Those hours land on the job but never against the asset, so the machine still reads as though it performed.
The cost arrives after the next bid is submitted. A figure that lands at close on a job that is still running is history. The estimate that could have used it went out before it existed.
Four things that decide whether the number comes back.
These are the four capabilities that turn equipment cost into something an estimator can use. Every one of them is ordinary in a rental system and unusual in a tracking system.
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The agreementIs the machine on a rental agreement, or just a transfer?
A movement record. The machine is somewhere, and that is all the record says.
A rental agreement per unit with a job, a start, an expected end, and a rate on it.
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The rateCan you charge the way the work was priced?
One flat rate, with negotiated project rates and any caps tracked outside the system that invoices.
Daily, weekly, monthly, and project-negotiated rates, with maximum caps applied automatically.
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The codingDoes the cost reach the code the estimate came from?
Applied downstream by someone who was not in the transaction, against a code chosen after the fact.
Cost code and work breakdown structure captured at the transaction and passed to your ERP.
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The detailCan you see cost per machine, per job?
A job total that reconciles, with nothing underneath it to explain a number that missed.
Cost per asset, per job, per code, with downtime charged against the unit that caused it.
Get those four right and the equipment number in a bid sharpens itself, job after job. Get them wrong and the allowance you use in 2027 is the one you were using in 2022.
Labor tells you what it cost. Equipment tells you eventually, and roughly.
Changing that needs three things a tracking tool does not do. Put every machine on a rental agreement against a job, with a rate and an expected end date. Charge on the same basis the work was priced. And send the cost to the code the estimate came from.
It compounds as the firm grows. Rates built from your own completed work travel. They move between offices, and they give a team pricing LNG or mining a starting point drawn from jobs Burns & McDonnell has already built, rather than an allowance somebody had to guess at.
The four areas the scorecard measures.
The scorecard returns a separate result for each of the four areas. That is where the output gets useful. Strong on visibility and thin on cost control is a common combination, and it points to a very different priority than one overall number would.
Fleet Visibility Across Jobs
Can every job, yard, and branch work from the same current picture of the fleet?
Visibility is the foundation the other three areas sit on. When the asset register and the ground disagree, every decision downstream inherits the error. Real-time visibility across the entire fleet lets equipment managers, warehouse staff, and field crews focus on high-impact work instead of chasing status.
Common signs of strain:
- Teams call or message the yard to find out what is available.
- The same asset exists in two systems with two different statuses.
- Buy, transfer, or rent gets decided one order at a time, by judgment.
- Asset numbers are keyed in by hand rather than scanned.
Utilization You Can Act On
Do you learn about idle equipment while you can still act on it?
Utilization creates value only when it arrives in time to change a decision. Exposing idle time by class, branch, and job lets teams transfer assets, avoid third-party rental spend, and turn downtime into dollars before the period closes.
Common signs of strain:
- Utilization arrives in a monthly report, after the window to transfer has passed.
- Equipment stays on charge because releasing it requires a phone call.
- Crews rent externally while the same class of machine sits idle on another job.
- Nobody can say what the fleet is earning this week without building a report.
Service and Equipment Readiness
Does maintenance run to a plan, or to a breakdown?
Downed equipment does not generate revenue. Unplanned failure costs more than the repair, because it also costs the crew standing beside the machine and the schedule that assumed the machine would run. Scheduling against runtime extends asset lifespan and avoids costly emergencies.
Common signs of strain:
- Service intervals follow calendar dates rather than runtime hours.
- Maintenance history lives apart from the record that tracks where the asset is working.
- A machine is unavailable because its service status is unclear.
- Downtime cost never reaches the job that lost the time.
Job-Level Cost and Profitability
Does equipment cost reach the right job, at the right time, at the right number?
Equipment runs as a business inside the business. It performs like one when precise job costing puts the cost of an asset in front of the project while the project can still respond, and when finance can separate owned cost from third-party rental spend.
Common signs of strain:
- Cost codes get reconstructed after the fact instead of captured at the request.
- Rates sit at a single flat structure because the system cannot handle more.
- Project-negotiated rates and cap agreements live outside the system that bills them.
- Finance and the project teams meet the numbers for the first time at month-end close.
10 questions. 5 minutes. Results on screen.
Tracking a machine and costing a machine are different jobs.
Most equipment platforms were built to answer one question: where is it. Tag systems, tool trackers, and telematics all do that well, and a contractor without one is worse off. But knowing where a machine is does not put it on a rental agreement to a job, does not apply the rate the work was bid at, and does not send a cost to the code the estimate came from.
That is a rental and job costing system, not a tracking system. It is why contractors frequently end up running both, and why the cost still lands late. Tracking answers where the machine is. Only a costed rental against a cost code answers what it cost the job.
The scorecard is a way to find where the gap sits today, across visibility, utilization, readiness, and cost control, without a sales conversation attached.
How would Burns & McDonnell score today?
Ten questions, five minutes, and a benchmarked result across visibility, utilization, readiness, and cost control. Worth running alongside someone from the equipment group and comparing answers. No cost and no demo attached.
Start the 5-minute assessmentWhat the Scorecard Covers
Ten practical questions about how the equipment operation runs today. In five minutes it shows which of the four areas deserves attention first, and how that compares with contractors running self-perform crews at similar scale.
What it takes to get the number back.
The scorecard is vendor neutral and costs nothing. RentalResult is what we build, and this is the job it does. It rents your own equipment to your own jobs: every machine on an agreement, at a rate, against a cost code, with the cost reaching your ERP. Contractors on the platform eliminate up to 75% of manual equipment tasks, and clients have increased equipment revenue by 20% renting idle units externally.
The four things a tracking tool does not do:
- Agreements, not transfers. Every machine goes onto a job with a start, an expected end, a rate, and a cost code behind it
- Cost where the estimate lives. Cost codes and work breakdown structure captured at the transaction, integrated with SAP, CMiC, Oracle, and Vista Viewpoint
- Variance you can trace. Cost per asset, per job, per code, so a number that missed can be explained rather than absorbed
- Rates that match the bid. Daily, weekly, monthly, and project-negotiated rates with maximum caps enforced automatically at invoice
- And the rest of it: utilization by class and branch, service against runtime, total cost of ownership per asset, and idle units rented out between projects
See where Burns & McDonnell stands across all four areas.
Ten questions, five minutes, and a benchmarked view of how well equipment cost reaches the people writing the next bid. No cost and no obligation attached.
Start the 5-minute scorecardNo demo required. The results are built to be shared internally, and they work as a starting point across construction, the equipment group, and project controls.