Milton Hydro

What were the challenges Milton Hydro was experiencing in creating estimates before implementing Quadra?

Prior to implementing Quadra as our estimating tool, our process was very manual. We primarily used Excel spreadsheets to develop bills of materials and project estimates. This required us to export inventory quantities and prices from our prior ERP system. From there, we transposed our estimated costs into our Offer to Connect prepared in Word. Any time we had to change a project’s bill of materials or the estimate, we had to manually go into the old ERP system, look up material prices, export the updates to Excel and update the bill of materials and estimates. We then transposed those updates into Word.

In 2024, we replaced our ERP system with IFS and integrated Quadra for job estimating. With Quadra, there is a lot more accuracy when creating a bill of materials and job estimate because now we’re pulling from standard assemblies where all of the material and pricing information is live, and Quadra is pulling the pricing directly from IFS’s inventory system. When our Engineering Technicians and Project Manager are building a bill of materials, they no longer have to manually retrieve prices for those materials. If needed, we can go back in and quickly update the pricing using Quadra, rather than having to manually go into our inventory system and pull out the prices.

Can you describe the implementation process including moving to IFS?

In 2023, Milton Hydro began the process of transitioning ERP systems. We formed an ERP team consisting of department heads who became subject matter experts. The Engineering Department recognized the opportunity to improve and enhance our estimating tools and developed a goal to use the ERP for total project estimating. With that goal in mind, we determined ERTH’s Quadra tool was well suited to meet our objective.

Because IFS and Quadra had not been integrated previously, the IFS and ERTH teams worked closely together to integrate the two systems. As part of the process our Engineering team updated a number of standards and provided our standards book to ERTH to upload into Quadra and was linked to IFS’s inventory. Through testing the configuration, we successfully confirmed that the integration worked and implemented Quadra in January 2025.

What are the key benefits of integrating Quadra with IFS?

We believe the key benefits of integrating Quadra with IFS are:

• Streamlined process for estimate creation and updates;
• Improved accuracy for bill of materials and estimate generation;
• Working with current information and reducing time spent within multiple environments creating estimates;
• End-to-end integration for enhanced project management.

Any other items you might want to highlight?

Our team is very impressed with Quadra’s functionality. While we see its value for job estimating, we are also impressed with how easy it is to create new assemblies or revise existing ones as we create new standards.

Integrating Quadra with IFS enhances our job estimating process. Job estimates developed in Quadra are “pushed” into IFS through the integration when Quadra events are approved. This allows Engineering and Operations, Finance, and Procurement to see the status of jobs, estimate and actual costs, and gives our Procurement team insight into material requirements. Additionally, our Operations team uses the information to schedule projects in their weekly planner.