In the traditional hard-bid type method, a set of contract drawings is provided to several (or more) general contractors to bid a project. These contractors will then give the drawings to several (or more) subcontractors per trade to bid their scope of work. In this process you may have just a few but often many many companies all doing take-offs of the same thing. From a high level this seems wasteful to have multiple companies performing the same task especially when we know that only one company will get the job and that estimating is very expensive. If this is true, why wouldn't the designer provide the material quantities and all of the companies just bid off that? Would the Construction Quantity Surveyors talked about in the other forum question be able to assist with this? Does this affect the idea of the "Best and Most Innovative" contractor getting the job? Would this allow more companies to bid the job and would this be a benefit to the owner