Customer Case Study
Kidwell × Pelles AI
How a 75-Year-Old Electrical & Low Voltage Contractor Standardized Preconstruction With AI
Kidwell encoded its estimating expertise into a single, repeatable process — turning preconstruction from individual craft into a team capability.
“We estimate that we’re saving approximately 70–80% of the time typically spent reviewing plans and specifications. That’s on a per-estimator basis, so when you multiply that across the number of projects we bid each year, the total time savings is significant.”
Company Profile
| Company | Kidwell, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Industry | Electrical Contracting & Low Voltage |
| Company Size | Large |
| Headquarters | Lincoln, NE |
| Offices | Omaha, Kearney, Des Moines, Sioux Falls |
| Service Area | Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota |
| Teams using Pelles | Electrical & low-voltage estimating, project management, superintendents, VDC |
The Challenge
Slow, manual, inconsistent — and impossible to scale
Every bid starts with hundreds of pages of project specifications that have to be read, interpreted, and translated into a clear scope for pricing and the field. For Kidwell’s estimating team, that work was a bottleneck — and it varied with whoever ran the bid.
- Spec review consumed days per bid. Estimators spent hours reading narrative spec language page by page, division by division, instead of pricing, scoping, and engineering.
- Output varied by who ran the bid. With no shared structure, two estimators reviewing the same specs could surface different details and miss different things — quality held together by individual expertise, not a repeatable process.
- Knowledge was tribal. What to look for on a healthcare project versus a K–12 project lived in the heads of the most experienced estimators. Onboarding a newer estimator meant months of side-by-side mentorship.
Read the full case study
How Kidwell standardized spec review, submittal prep, and report generation — and what changed as a result.