Improving visibility and cost control in local government estimating
Tweed Shire Council sought a more consistent and structured approach to estimating infrastructure projects — enabling greater control over costs and improved reporting. Benchmark Estimating helped the team move away from spreadsheets and implement a process aligned with engineering best practice.
About Tweed Shire Council
Located in northern New South Wales, Tweed Shire Council is the region’s largest local government body, serving nearly 90,000 residents. The Council manages a wide range of essential services, including water and wastewater, planning and development, parks and reserves, roads and drainage, and community facilities.
For the Infrastructure Delivery team, producing accurate, repeatable estimates was vital - particularly across complex capital works programmes.
The challenge
Tweed Shire Council had been relying on spreadsheets to generate unit rate estimates for infrastructure projects. This approach resulted in inconsistencies, limited auditing, and difficulty tracking performance across estimates.
Key goals included:
- Improving estimating accuracy and structure
- Enabling consistent methodology across the team
- Strengthening cost control and visibility during delivery
- Reducing manual rework and improving reporting
The decision
The team adopted Benchmark Estimating to bring structure, repeatability, and reporting into their capital works estimating. Drawing on prior experience with the platform, the Council recognised the value of its activity-based estimating logic.
“Prior to making the move to Benchmark Estimating, we were using MS Excel and the unit rate estimates were not accurate enough.”
— Ian Kite, formerly Manager Infrastructure Delivery, Tweed Shire Council
The outcome
Using Benchmark Estimating enabled the team to:
- Move from spreadsheets to structured project libraries
- Generate resource and duration reports for better cost tracking
- Monitor progress against estimates in real-time
- Analyse trends across estimates using updated wage or resource rates
“It’s easy to see how each component of a project is progressing… if there’s more labour or plant than planned, you can ask ‘why?’"
— Ian Kite
The software’s logic — developed by engineers — made it intuitive for the team to adopt, and support during onboarding ensured a smooth implementation.
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