BOQ and Material Take-Off Services for Structural Projects

Quantities decide whether a tender is won and whether a project makes money, and they are produced under the worst possible conditions: at the end of the design phase, against a submission deadline, by whoever is available. RIH Engineering provides outsourced BOQ production and structural material take-off as a dedicated backend team, so quantities get measured properly rather than estimated quickly.

What you get

• Structural bill of quantities in your template and your measurement convention
• Concrete quantities by element, grade and level, with formwork areas measured separately
• Reinforcement steel quantity take-off by diameter, element and level, reconciled against the bar bending schedule
• Structural steel take-off by section, grade and assembly, with connection material included
• Excavation, backfill and substructure quantities
• Quantities traceable back to the drawing or model they were measured from, element by element
• Comparison against a previous revision, so you can see exactly what a design change cost in quantity terms
• Take-off produced from 2D drawings or extracted from a Revit or Tekla model, whichever you work in

What we handle for you

Take-off is methodical work that rewards patience and punishes interruption, which is exactly why it goes wrong when a designer does it between other tasks. Miss one element type across a repeated floor and the error multiplies by the number of floors.

We run take-off as a dedicated task with a traceable method. Every quantity references the drawing and element it came from, so when a number is queried you can answer the query rather than remeasure. When the design changes, we reissue with a comparison against the previous revision, so the cost impact of the change is visible immediately.

The cost of doing this in-house

Quantities get rushed because they sit on the critical path to a submission deadline. An under-measured BOQ wins a tender at a price that cannot be delivered, and the project runs at a loss from day one. An over-measured BOQ loses the tender outright, and you never find out why.

Either way the feedback arrives too late to fix. Nobody audits a BOQ after the tender is lost, and the one that was won at the wrong price becomes a twelve-month margin problem that gets blamed on site conditions. The measurement hours that would have prevented it cost a fraction of either outcome, and they are the first hours cut when the deadline tightens.

Why RIH Engineering is safe to try

Send us one package. We produce the take-off against your template and your measurement convention, with every quantity traceable to its source element. You spot-check whatever you want. If the method does not match how you measure, we adjust and reissue.

Under our dedicated resource model you get named staff who learn your BOQ template, your measurement convention and your level of detail. That consistency is what makes the numbers comparable from project to project, which is what makes them useful for benchmarking your own pricing.

Our process

1. You send the drawings or model, your BOQ template, and the measurement convention or standard method you work to
2. We confirm the basis: measurement standard, level of detail, element breakdown and how provisional items are to be handled
3. Quantities measured element by element, with each measurement referenced back to its source drawing or model element
4. Concrete, formwork, reinforcement and structural steel measured separately and cross-checked against each other for consistency
5. Reinforcement quantities reconciled against the bar bending schedule where one exists
6. Internal check carried out on a sample basis across every element type, not just the large items
7. BOQ compiled in your template, with the traceability backup supplied alongside it
8. Package issued for your review, with a revision comparison if this is an update to an earlier take-off

Tools and standards

We produce take-off from AutoCAD drawings and extract quantities directly from Revit and Tekla Structures models where the project is BIM-based, with output delivered in Excel to your template.

Measurement standards supported include POMI, CESMM, NRM and SMM7, as well as your own in-house convention. For UAE projects we work to the measurement convention the client or quantity surveyor specifies, and we confirm it in writing before measurement starts so there is no dispute about basis later.

Client-preferred tools: Our team can be trained to use the tool preferred by the client. If your workflow depends on a specific platform, template or drafting standard, we adapt to it rather than force you into ours.

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