Tiling Subcontractor for Main Contractors: Fewer Surprises, Cleaner Handovers

Earlier this year we wrote about moving from reactive to connected — about how live project information helps us deliver tiling projects better. This post is about what that means for the people who employ us.

Ask a main contractor what they want from a tiling subcontractor and the answer is rarely about tiling. It is about knowing who is on site this week. It is about getting an answer on a detail before it stops the follow-on trade. It is about not discovering a variation claim four months after the instruction. It is about the O&M pack arriving before it holds up practical completion.

Over the past year we have rebuilt how ABM runs a package around exactly those points, using Microsoft Dataverse as a single project record, Power Apps in the hands of our site teams, and Claude — an AI assistant from Anthropic — sitting on top of it. Here is what that changes for you.

A Price That Still Holds After Award

The most expensive subcontractor is the one who prices keenly and then rebuilds the number once they are appointed.

Our pricing now comes off our own purchase history rather than memory. Across 2,041 priced items and 1,559 purchase orders, we can see what we have genuinely paid for a large-format porcelain, a tanking system or an anti-fracture membrane, from which supplier, and how recently. When we submit a rate, it is evidenced.

Just as importantly, the assumptions behind it are recorded at the time — substrate condition, access, attendances, setting-out responsibility, movement joint strategy. They arrive with the tender rather than emerging as claims after award, which means your buyer knows what they are comparing and what they are covering elsewhere.

Qualifications That Travel From Tender to Site

Most subcontractor disputes start in the gap between what was priced and what the site team believed was included. That gap exists because tender information and delivery information usually live in different places and different people's heads.

For us they are the same record. When our team mobilises, they inherit the qualifications, exclusions and clarifications the price was built on. If your PM asks whether something is in our scope, the answer comes back the same day with the tender-stage entry behind it — dated and attributed — instead of a week later after someone has been through an old email chain.

That is not about being difficult on scope. It is about settling scope questions in days rather than at final account.

Visibility Without Having to Chase Us

Our supervisors record labour on site, weather, progress and issues through a Power App on a phone or tablet. It takes a minute, and it writes straight into the same project record our commercial team works from.

The practical effect for you is that when your PM asks how many operatives were on site last Tuesday, what area was completed, or why an area stalled, we can answer from a record rather than a recollection. Progress reporting, valuation backup and your own client reporting stop depending on us returning a call.

We currently hold close to 1,000 dated project notes across 117 live and completed projects — every one of them tied to a specific job rather than sitting in an inbox.

RFIs Raised Early Enough to Protect Your Programme

An RFI raised the week work is due to start is a query. The same RFI raised the week the area is handed to us is a delay.

Our site teams can raise a query the moment they see a drawing conflict, a missing detail or a substrate that will not take what has been specified — from site, in plain language, without waiting to get back to an office. It lands as a tracked RFI against the project with a date on it, visible to whoever needs to push it with the design team.

We have 141 RFIs on record. The value of that is not the count — it is that questions surface while there is still programme float to absorb the answer.

Variations Priced When They Are Instructed, Not at Final Account

This is the one that costs main contractors the most goodwill, and it is the one we have worked hardest on.

121 variations are recorded against our projects, each captured at the point of instruction with the date, the person who instructed it, and what changed. A variation submitted within days of the instruction is something your QS can assess, approve or challenge while the facts are fresh and the budget can absorb it. The same variation reconstructed from memory at final account is a dispute, and it is a dispute you did not budget for.

We would rather have the conversation early and occasionally be told no than arrive with a schedule of claims at the end.

Records That Stand Up

Where there is a genuine disagreement — a contra-charge, a delay allocation, a quality allegation — the resolution usually comes down to who has the better record.

Ours is contemporaneous by design. Site diaries, notes, RFIs, instructions and photographs are captured as they happen, against the job, with dates and names attached. In practice this is as useful to a main contractor as it is to us: it tends to settle the question quickly rather than escalating it, and it means we can substantiate a position without a month of reconstruction.

Handover Documentation That Doesn't Hold Up Your PC

By the time we reach completion, most of the handover pack already exists.

The products and systems installed are on the purchase orders. The instructed changes are on the variations. The queries and their answers are on the RFIs. Compiling an O&M manual becomes a formatting exercise on information we already hold, rather than chasing suppliers and demobilised operatives for data that should have been captured months earlier.

If your handover deadline is tight, this is where you feel the difference most.

Where Judgement Stays With People

We are deliberate about what the AI does and does not do.

It reads our records, drafts documents, checks prices against our own history and prepares things for review. It does not approve a variation, agree a price, sign off a quality issue or send anything to a client on its own. Every commercial decision belongs to a named person, and every AI-drafted record is confirmed by whoever is accountable for it before it becomes part of the project history.

Nothing about this replaces a competent supervisor or an experienced estimator. It removes the admin that stops them doing their actual job.

What a Tiling Subcontractor for Main Contractors Delivers on Your Project

We are still building. Site diaries and task tracking are the newest parts of the system, and linking measurement and takeoff into the same chain is next.

But the direction is set, and it is aimed squarely at the things that make a subcontractor easy or difficult to run: a price that holds, scope that is settled, progress you can see, questions raised early, changes priced on time, records that stand up, and documentation that arrives before you need it.

If you are putting a tiling package out to tender on a residential or commercial scheme, we are happy to walk your team through how this works on a live project before you appoint anyone.

Key Takeaways for Main Contractors

• Our rates are evidenced against our own purchase history, so the price holds after award.

• Tender qualifications carry through to the site team — scope questions are answered in days, not at final account.

• Progress, labour and site issues are recorded live, so your PM can get an answer without chasing.

• RFIs are raised from site the moment an issue appears, while there is still float to absorb the answer.

• Variations are captured and priced at the point of instruction, not accumulated into an end-of-job claim.

• Contemporaneous records settle contra-charge and delay questions quickly.

• Handover and O&M documentation is assembled from information already captured, not chased after demobilisation.