For a preconstruction team built on customer service and trust, the right estimating platform isn't just about speed, it's about the confidence to hit send. Here's how Blach Construction found a tool that works for every estimator on the team.

For over 50 years, Blach Construction has built its business on a simple idea: their work should make its communities better. 

As Emma Peters, Director of Preconstruction Services, puts it, Blach isn't chasing the “flashy” jobs. The company's main markets — affordable housing and education — are the kind of projects you can drive by, point to, and know that you had a real impact in someone's life.

That mission shapes how this general contractor wins work in the first place. 

Blach earns its trust through preconstruction; the relationships, the data, and the collaboration that prove Blach is a partner worth choosing before a single shovel hits the ground.

"We pre-sell ourselves to show the owner or the district that we're a partner that they want to work with," Emma says. 

"That's not only just with the relationships that we form, but showing we give the best deliverables possible."

Precon, in other words, isn't a back-office function at Blach. It's the pitch.

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A team ready to move beyond spreadsheets and embrace the cloud

Blach's preconstruction team is a mix of backgrounds and tenures, and that mix became a central challenge when it came to software. 

"We found that with other softwares, some people that were more tech-savvy were getting the most use out of it and finding the most benefit, and people that weren't, were struggling to keep up and maybe not using it to the fullest capacity."

On top of that, Blach's work spans multiple markets — housing and commercial and education — and most estimating tools it tried were built with one market in mind, not several.

"We really wanted something that would kind of break the boundaries between the different markets... and we wanted everyone to be happy with the software that we chose." — Emma Peters, Director of Preconstruction Services

There was also the real sticking point that kept a group of Blach's estimators tied to Excel: customization.

Blach had built a template in Excel that the team loved — the formatting, the layout, the way it delivered information to clients. The problem wasn't the template. It was Excel itself.

"The problem with Excel, like anyone will say in our position, is that there's the potential for errors. While we loved the formatting of Excel and what our template looked like in there, we were finding that with multiple people using the same template, there were errors that were happening and formulas that weren't [working]."

Testing Ediphi as a team, not a top-down decision

Emma and the precon team built live estimates in four different estimating tools they were testing. They  met regularly to compare notes, and narrowed the field based on where each platform actually helped, and where it got in the way.

As a part of the evaluation, Ediphi's team took Blach's existing Excel template — yes, that same one the firm had already built and trusted — and rebuilt it as a working template inside the platform.

"We already had our existing template, and we just gave that to Ediphi and had them connect it through the plugin."

Structured training ran alongside it, and Emma points to something else as the real difference-maker: a direct line to Ediphi's support team.

"It was really the availability that Ediphi's customer service had... just being able to email or call them to get a response quickly and move forward."

Today, six estimators are fully integrated into Ediphi, and Blach's preconstruction team isn't running any other software — just Ediphi.

Using Ediphi on a complex, multi-funder affordable housing project

The proof came on one of Blach's most complicated jobs to date: a hundred-million dollar affordable housing project awarded pre-entitlement, early in preconstruction — exactly the stage Blach thrives in.

The project mixed workforce and affordable housing across seven buildings and three structure types, on a massive site, funded by two separate sources that each required their own breakdown by phase and funding type.

"It was just a really complicated setup process, a huge project, and we really needed to be able to stay organized and feed the client the information the way they needed to see it."

Emma worked with the Ediphi team to map out the right structure before building anything, breaking the project into smaller, organized pieces from the start rather than one sprawling estimate.

"I laid it all out: What's the best approach to do this? They helped me through that process, helped me set it up in a way that would prevent me from backtracking, because there was a better way to do it."

The result was a deliverable clear enough that the owner could zero in on specific use groups and target areas for value management — something Emma says would have been harder to pull off in any tool she'd used before Ediphi.

Time saved trusting the estimate

Emma is specific about where the benefit actually shows up; in the moments right before an estimate goes out the door, when the stakes and the anxiety both peak.

"Right before you hit submit, or send off an estimate, that's when you have the most anxiety, and you want to keep going back through it, making sure that formulas are right... I just don't have that same concern when I'm finishing up something with Ediphi." — Emma Peters, Director of Preconstruction Services at Blach

That confidence comes from being able to check the work quickly and thoroughly, filtering down to specific use groups or scopes and reviewing them in isolation, rather than hunting through a massive spreadsheet hoping nothing broke.

"You just don't have that same level of confidence in something like Excel... the filtering on it makes it so much easier to quickly jump to different views, and jump to different categories."

A culture shift, one department meeting at a time

Maybe the clearest signal of how much has changed shows up in Blach's own recurring preconstruction meetings. 

There's always been a standing agenda item for the estimating software. What's said during that slot has changed completely.

"In the years prior to Ediphi, that time was used more for resolutions — these are issues that I'm having, this is what I'm frustrated about. When we talk about Ediphi, it's oftentimes, 'here's what I learned, here's another trick that they have, here's something that helped.' There's not that level of frustration."

Emma points to customer service as the other piece the whole team feels, not just the estimators who talk to support directly.

"It's drastically different with Ediphi than we've experienced previously... there's a lot of red tape with the requests that we had [before], whereas with Ediphi it's like, let's figure out a way to do this."

What's next: Turning the planning into the pitch

Blach is still early in exploring Ediphi's cost modeling tools, but Emma is already thinking about how to turn that work outward. 

Since Blach wins business by proving its value in preconstruction, they are focused on using Ediphi's output to show clients exactly what they're getting.

"We want to use the work we're doing in Ediphi to market ourselves...That's where we see it going; how we use Ediphi strategically to show what we're capable of." — Emma Peters, Director of Preconstruction Services at Blach

Asked what she'd tell another preconstruction leader considering Ediphi, Emma didn't reach for a feature list. She went straight to what the job actually feels like, day to day.

"Our job is stressful enough, and so anything that you can add to actually reduce the amount of stress is a win for preconstruction. I think anyone in our industry can — that will resonate with them."

For a team built on trust, detail, and showing up early, Ediphi brought greater speed and precision to Blach’s estimating process, giving the team even more confidence in the numbers behind every estimate.

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About Blach Construction

Founded in 1970, Blach Construction delivers structures of enduring quality and value throughout California. The firm’s diverse portfolio includes community-focused TK-12 and higher education facilities, modern civic and workplace environments, and affordable, supportive and market-rate housing developments. The firm is consistently ranked among California’s top contractors by Engineering News-Record and has received multiple Construction Safety Excellence Awards from the Associated General Contractors of California.

Blach is headquartered in San Jose with offices in Monterey and Southern California. To learn more, please visit blach.com and engage via LinkedIn.