About BuildingConnected

BuildingConnected, a preconstruction solution that is part of Autodesk Construction Cloud, makes it easy for general contractors and owners to find the right subcontractors and manage the bidding process from start to finish. The platform simplifies bid workflows and enables consistent, transparent, and collaborative management of the bidding process. With over a million construction professionals on the BuildingConnected network, it is the place to go to get things built.

Matching contractor location and service regions, at scale

BuildingConnected helps to qualify subcontractors and manage project risk by providing automated recommendations and intelligent matching. A primary consideration when matching potential contractors to projects is geographic distribution and how far a contractor would need to travel to a project site. In the past, BuildingConnected primarily used historical data and assumptions about subcontractors’ willingness to travel. However, this approach was not reliable and required time-intensive manual data management. 

The BuildingConnected team realized that they needed a better way to give general contractors a way to proactively and precisely define the geographic area that they service. In addition, they wanted a solution that was flexible enough to allow subcontractors to define Worker Service Areas to specify the areas where they were open to working. 

Using text-based answers, such as writing out zipcodes, was cumbersome and prone to errors. Free-form polygons drawn on a map were typically too imprecise, and the resulting polygon data was bulky to manage on the backend. Using official and well-recognized boundaries to define service areas, such as counties or postal codes, seemed like the right approach; however, it was daunting undertaking to consider creating and maintaining a comprehensive and accurate database of all the geographic areas that might be needed to define service areas around the world.

Mapbox Boundaries tilesets provide efficient and reliable location details

Mapbox Boundaries offered an easy-to-use solution. With over 5 million boundaries covering political, statistical, administrative, and postal areas worldwide, Mapbox Boundaries data is expertly curated and maintained for each country. By using Mapbox Boundaries, the BuildingConnected team could call upon a reliable source of detailed, up-to-date polygons for geographic areas of varying scales and types.

By building with Mapbox Boundaries, the BuildingConnected product team is able to provide a visual tool for contractors to proactively and very easily indicate the exact areas in which they perform jobs. This change helps owners and general contractors by giving them more time to focus on choosing the right trades to bid on the right jobs.

A contractor can select the areas that they service via an intuitive map-based interface, and the BuildingConnected database only needs to add the metadata identifying the selected areas to the contractor’s record. This architecture streamlines both the backend data management and frontend client-side rendering performance, built with Mapbox GL JS and the Boundaries tilesets.

Built-in location-based filtering with the Mapbox Tilequery API

When a subcontractor sets up their profile on Building Connected, they define both where they are based and which service areas they can travel to. General contractors define the geographies from where they will accept subcontractor bids. The Building Connected platform helps to match with each other by using the Mapbox Tilequery API to match available projects, general contractors, and subcontractors that have overlapping geographic preferences. 

The built-in location intelligence of the Building Connected platform means that general contractors avoid spending time reviewing bids from subcontractors that are too far away, and subcontractors only see potential projects that are a spatial match for them. For example, a general contractor that serves the San Francisco area might choose to set up their profile as open to accepting subcontractor bids from across the Bay Area. If the general contractor posts a project in San Francisco that needs electrical subcontractors, then a subcontractor based in Oakland would be able to find that project when searching. But if a subcontractor in Los Angeles tries to find the same project in San Francisco, they would not see it because it is too far outside what the general contractor defined as an acceptable geographic range.