The materials bill was wrong. At Azuria Water Solutions, a project manager in Canada noticed costs climbing above the estimate. He investigated. A currency conversion error had inflated materials costs by 40%. According to Azuria’s account, he caught it within a day.
There is a pleasing wrinkle: this manager had initially resisted the new software. Azuria had replaced disconnected Excel processes with InEight Estimate and Control. Now the numbers were detailed enough to make an anomaly visible. The tool he had questioned gave him a reason to ask a better question.
- Connect the bid, budget, schedule, and work actually completed.
- Built for capital-project owners, contractors, and engineers.
- Start with a module; broader deployments need common processes and training.
That incident captures InEight’s appeal better than a sweeping promise about digital transformation. Construction problems have a financial life before they become a financial surprise. The useful interval is the time available to notice, investigate, and act.
01 / The estimate is only the beginning
InEight makes project controls software: the machinery that connects what a construction project is supposed to deliver with what it is costing and how far it has progressed. Its market includes water systems, transportation infrastructure, mines, power projects, and industrial facilities. The company reports 850 customers and 575,000 users across more than 60 countries.
Its history starts with a wonderfully literal name: Hard Dollar. Founded in 1989, that business developed computerized estimating software. Kiewit invested in 2012 and acquired it within a year. The current InEight company took shape in 2014. Acquisitions in 2018 added QA Software, Basis, and M-SIX, bringing document control, planning, scheduling, and modeling into the portfolio.
The sequence matters. A contractor’s estimate contains assumptions about crews, quantities, materials, and productivity. Once work begins, those assumptions meet reality. InEight’s expanding product family follows that encounter, carrying information beyond the bid and into execution.
02 / Give every number a job
Estimate lets teams structure bids around the way work will be built, compare vendor quotes, and check assumptions against historical performance. Schedule combines critical path planning with team feedback, look-ahead planning, and risk analysis. Its AI tools use historical schedules to help develop plans; people still contribute the judgments about durations, constraints, and risk.
Control handles budgets and forecasts. Contract and Change organize commitments and scope changes. Plan & Progress connects work packages with field productivity. Document manages revisions and review workflows; Model brings construction information into a visual environment. Report & Explore provides reporting and analysis across the resulting data.
One revealing detail appears in Control’s documentation: original budget, current budget, and current estimate are distinct. A changed plan does not erase the original promise. Keeping those views separate allows a manager to investigate variance instead of simply replacing yesterday’s number with today’s.
03 / The paperwork has a pattern
At Superior Construction’s North Split interchange project in Indianapolis, the problem was document traffic. The work involved rebuilding the I-65/I-70 interchange and coordinating design and construction. A general document repository offered less functionality than the team wanted for a complex, multiyear job.
Superior chose InEight Document for configurable document capture, review, and management. At 50% design completion, the team had already processed more than 1,300 documents. Recurring submittals accounted for roughly 80% of submittal traffic, giving automation a particularly useful target.
The lesson is available to any organization with repetitive approvals: look for the repeated transaction. A prettier filing cabinet does little for a review that still depends on somebody remembering to chase the next person.
was recurring
04 / A platform needs a shared language
AECOM took the idea up a level, collaborating with InEight on a Program Controls Engine that extends project controls into program management. Contracts connect to projects, projects to programs, and programs to strategy. AECOM also created a 350-page Program Controls Playbook to standardize delivery practices.
That accompanying document is a useful corrective to the notion that integration arrives entirely inside a software license. People must agree on definitions, reporting responsibilities, and how work is broken down. InEight’s implementation approach includes solution engineers and role-based training. Its own remote-work culture emphasizes accountability alongside integrity, respect, passion, and innovation.
“You can go from one project to the next and you’re talking the same language.”
Justin Terminella / Vice President, Kiewit
Positioning also depends on the particular job. Oracle Aconex is a document-control alternative; Primavera P6 is a scheduling alternative. Yet Azuria connects InEight Control to P6 and its ERP. A buyer can keep a scheduler while changing the financial conversation around it.
05 / Buy a testable improvement
InEight sells enterprise software through custom contracts, with pricing shaped by products, users, and contract length. For a smaller pilot, NOW offers monthly or annual subscriptions. Published monthly prices are $260 per user for Estimate, $199 for Schedule, $73 for Document, and $55 for Compliance & Completions.
The product boundaries deserve attention: Estimate NOW excludes benchmarking, and its Schedule integration requires buying Schedule. A credible pilot therefore starts with a specific workflow and the capabilities needed to test it. Compare the cost with time spent reconciling records, preparing changes, and maintaining existing systems.
The same discipline applies to results. Azuria reports doubled change order-related revenue and gross profit after implementation, while acknowledging parallel business initiatives. That is encouraging evidence, with a sensible limit on what it proves.
In an October 2026 release, InEight argued that homegrown systems can become a maintenance burden as organizations grow. Its April partnership with Japan’s Kozo Keikaku Engineering adds local adoption expertise. Both developments point toward a practical constraint: connected software needs support, consistent data, and people willing to use it.
For a team unwilling to maintain those habits, another platform can become another place to enter stale numbers. The portable lesson is to preserve the estimate, connect actual work to it, and make deviations easy to question. Sometimes the return begins with one skeptical manager noticing a bill.