Contractor

Your objective to secure the best possible surety program can be accomplished in part by making your company data portable. The better your surety program, the more profitable your company will be.

Establishing a surety program

Your surety program is established by providing your surety agent with underwriting information on your construction company. The CHICO process strives to demonstrate a way to develop a procedure to make your data “portable”. This will allow your data to be imported and processed by both your surety agent and surety market in a way that reduces redundant data entry and promotes multiple surety market participation. Your objective to secure the best possible surety program can be accomplished in part by making your company data portable.

Limited portions of that same data can be accessed by project owners and prime contractors looking for qualified bidders. It can also be accessed by your company to generate pre-qualification materials often required as a prerequisite to bidding.

Pre-Bid

The CHICO process requires the project owner to provide basic project information for you on their website in a downloadable file using industry adopted open standards. Whether you are a prime contractor or a subcontractor you can access project information from the owner’s website and forward the project information to your surety and insurance agent.

Most contractors use some form of a bid management. These can range from a simple excel spreadsheet to more comprehensive commercial applications. Getting the project data to import into those applications is not difficult, and can be accomplished by mapping the fields, or a simple cut and paste. Those applications can also be made to export the project data by someone with basic knowledge of computers.

If you do not have a bid management application that can import/export the project data can sign up for Bid List Connection, a very basic application that not only helps manage your bidding schedule, but acts as a communication tool to pass along (export) the data to your surety agents.

Bid Submission to Owner

There are various examples of electronic surety transactions currently in use and the surety industry is developing the policies and procedures for a nationwide electronic surety transaction structure. No matter what direction this development takes, it will always require the basic project and contractor data in a digital format. The CHICO process demonstrates how that data could be standardized to promote and encourage that development.

Your company’s data, added to the project data you export, provides the information your surety agent needs for processing the bond request and will be the foundation for an electronic surety bid bond.

Project award

When you are the successful bidder on a project your agent will already have most of the information necessary for issuing the final bond because of the earlier import of the bid information.

Your surety agent will add the additional information required for conversion to a final bond, and for exporting that revised data to the surety and/or repository.

Project Risk Management

The CHICO process is more than just moving bid data between you and your surety. It also involves establishing an ongoing link to that data during the progress of the project. Access to ongoing project data will have a significant beneficial impact to the ability of surety companies to monitor their portfolio of projects and improve their underwriting results.

When you provide “portable” data at the outset, your surety can efficiently and cost effectively deliver your company the best surety program possible, and your surety agent can provide better service as well.

Your project can be monitored by the surety using the links you originally provided during the bidding process. This gives the surety more flexibility in the underwriting process, allowing them to extend the surety credit you deserve.

Summary

Some of the main objectives of the CHICO process are to:

• Demonstrate how construction project data can be "portable".



• Engage participating university students in educational opportunities through exploration and development of Business Information Modeling for the administration of surety programs.



• Demonstrate efficient use of evolving technologies through data portability to promote an enhanced surety underwriting environment thereby improving access to surety credit for contractors.



• Create a surety based risk management capability for project owners and/or general contractors though the efficient use of subcontract bonds.



• Promote the development of commercially viable applications that can participate anywhere along the life cycle of a construction project as a result of the broad adoption of open standards.