After nine years in preconstruction, Dave Heiberger will tell you plainly: precon is its own discipline — and it has been lagging.

Today, as Technology Innovation Manager at Landry French, a 15-year-old GC with a strong foothold in the northeast across commercial, life science, healthcare, education, and multifamily markets — Dave is the person responsible for doing something about it.

His latest move: bringing Ediphi into Landry French’s preconstruction operation.

Here is how a GC built on 15 years of client trust found the platform that finally checks all the boxes and is rebuilding preconstruction around it.

A strong team running on fragmented tools

Landry French's preconstruction team is a tenured group — 10 estimators, most of them senior-level, with decades of instincts and hard-won pricing knowledge.

The problem: it lives in their heads. It doesn't transfer. It doesn't scale. And when a senior estimator retires, it walks out the door with them.

The team runs hard, too — roughly 80 pursuits a year, with four to five estimate deliverables per awarded project. That volume was being produced on a platform that was database-driven in theory but not built the way estimators actually think. Data was siloed. Historical costs were hard to surface. Cross-office collaboration was impractical. 

"I would argue that solutions out there hadn't checked all the boxes,” says Dave, “Up until Ediphi came onto the market.”

The search for something built by people who’ve been in the seat

When Dave started evaluating Ediphi, the thing that stood out first wasn’t a feature. It was a feeling.

“Clearly the product that’s being built is by people that have been in the industry and have sat in the seat of estimators and within preconstruction departments .” — Dave Heiberger, Technology Innovation Manager at Landry French

He adds: “When you look at Ediphi, you think, ‘Yeah, this is how we look at preconstruction.’ It just functions the way we would want it to be.”

What are those specific functions?

• End-to-end workflows. Concept estimate through buyout — GCs&GRs, cost modeling, and estimating — all under one roof. 
• Cost modeling based on limited information. When a client needs a number before designs, Landry French can build around units, rooms, and systems (not backwards-engineer from a percentage).
• Cloud-native collaboration. A shared data is a huge prerequisite for how Dave thinks about scale, “If one region needs help on a project, an estimator from another hops on and collaborates in real time. There’s no file transfers or version issues. That unlocks capacity we already had.” 

The platform matched the way they actually worked. The decision was straightforward from there.

The data was always there. Now they can use it.

The right platform doesn't just change how estimates get built. It changes who can build them — and what the organization can do next.

Consider a junior estimator assigned to a scope they've never priced before. 

Today, the answer is to find a senior person and ask. That works fine when they're available. It works less well at 4 p.m. on a deadline. And it doesn't work at all once that person retires.

"You can't take someone green out of college and say 'go estimate.' But instead of hunting down a senior estimator every time they hit an unfamiliar scope, they right-click a line item and see what that unit cost was on every past project. And that historical data grows as we continue using the platform ” Dave tells us.

Zoom out and it’s the same at the organizational level. Landry French is growing through geographic expansion, potential acquisitions, and new market sectors. Each of those paths requires a preconstruction operation that can scale with the same standards. And, in Dave’s opinion, Ediphi is ahead of the pack. 

“The scalability is above the competition...This idea that we can have everyone using the same system, with the same standards, the same nomenclature, and be able to plug and play people from different regions if needed — we couldn’t do that before.”

"Partners like Ediphi are now our source of truth, helping us make better decisions with the data that we already generate." — Dave Heiberger, Technology Innovation Manager at Landry French

Like most GCs, Landry French's clients expect estimates in a specific format, branded and structured the way they've always received them. The Last Mile integration Ediphi has with Excel generates reports in minutes; another solution to scale.

"The fact that we can just plug into Excel and format our own…I don't think anything else out there offers that level of custom reporting functionality."

Early implementation: Starting right

Dave acknowledges the natural human resistance to change, “No one wants to sign up for change, even when the old platform wasn’t great”.

This looming fear of data migration, retraining, the disruption to live pursuits keeps a lot of organizations from making a move they know they need to make.

Landry French's experience has been different. 

Rather than migrating data line by line, the team is using Ediphi's Unit Price Catalog as their baseline and working with the Ediphi team to configure it with their own historical data.

Dave credits a lot of that to who's been in the room on Ediphi's side. "The folks we've been working with have been in the industry. Everyone seems like they've sat in this seat,” he says.

As for the estimating team, the reception has been positive — across all ages, across all experience levels.

"Even our most seasoned estimators, the ones who've done it the same way for 20 years, picked it up quickly." — Dave Heiberger, Technology Innovation Manager at Landry French

What success looks like

The goal is simple: give a client a number at the concept stage — before the design is real — and have it hold up through GMP.

"If we give a client a rough order of magnitude at the conceptual stage and come in under that months or years later, that's success. We pride ourselves on being transparent and confident in what we deliver."  Dave says.

That kind of reliability, delivered consistently, is what has built Landry French's reputation in the northeast over 15 years. 

For Landry/French, Ediphi isn’t just solving today’s problem — it’s building the data foundation that makes the next generation of preconstruction technology possible.

As AI continues to reshape how estimates get built and validated, having clean, structured, centralized cost data isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a prerequisite. "We're not just buying a better estimating tool. Every estimate we put through Ediphi builds our dataset and it compounds over time. AI is already reshaping our industry, and the GCs with clean, structured data are the ones who'll get the most out of it. That’s exactly where we’re positioning ourselves. That's the long game."

See what Ediphi can do for your preconstruction team here.