"On the UPMC job we were budgeted at an 18% CMU waste factor. That number gets eaten by RFI churn, bond beam recalcs, and lintel coordination that no one writes down. We finished the scope at 7%. That's roughly $680,000 back to the GMP — not a margin win on a cost-reimbursable job, but it's the number that keeps UPMC calling us back."
Keystone Masonry Group has laid brick in western Pennsylvania for half a century. Founded in 1976 by the Petrov family as a two-crew brick shop in Lawrenceville, the company grew through the regional healthcare and higher-education building waves of the 1990s and 2000s. Today Keystone employs 140 craftworkers out of BAC Local 9, with four concurrent superintendents and a yard in Sharpsburg that warehouses roughly $1.4M of standing CMU, brick veneer, and dimensional stone at any given moment.
Healthcare is Keystone's anchor vertical. UPMC alone has accounted for about 38% of revenue over the past four years — Mercy Pavilion expansion, Shadyside tower, Passavant replacement, and a rotating set of smaller medical office buildings across Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. The rest is higher ed (Pitt, CMU, Duquesne), K-12 brick veneer work, and occasional historic restoration where Keystone's dimensional-stone crews hold a regional near-monopoly.
Hospital masonry is an RFI machine. The UPMC Passavant Phase 3 replacement tower — 480,000 SF, $8.2M CMU scope against a GMP contract — produced 284 masonry-specific RFIs across the 14-month build. Each one forced a re-look at quantity: a bond beam elevation change, a relocated MEP sleeve pattern, a shift in opening widths that cascaded across multiple floors. Keystone's takeoff baseline carried an 18% waste factor — not because the crews were wasteful, but because the estimating team padded every scope to survive mid-build RFI churn. That padding was real money in a GMP environment, where unused contingency returns to the owner.
ACI 530-22 (now TMS 402) bond-beam and reinforcement spacing rules compounded the problem. On load-bearing CMU walls per ASTM C90, every horizontal joint reinforcement run, every vertical cell grout fill, and every bond beam location has to reconcile against the structural engineer's schedule. Manually cross-checking 40 structural sheets against 60+ architectural elevations took Keystone's senior estimator two full weeks per hospital package. Misses showed up as rebar shortages on week 6 and mortar overages on week 14.
The third problem was bid-phase accuracy versus build-phase reality. Keystone's post-project reconciliation data showed that manual takeoffs on complex healthcare packages ran 8–12% over-quantified on CMU and 4–7% under-quantified on lintel steel. The under-quantification was the dangerous number — lintel shortages triggered crew idle time at roughly $4,200 per day per crew. On one 2023 project, cumulative lintel delays cost $78,000 in labor burden that never came back in change orders.
Keystone brought Pilrs in during the pre-construction phase of the UPMC Passavant Phase 3 project in early 2025. The pilot was structured as a parallel takeoff: the senior estimator ran her conventional Quick Bid workflow on the full CMU scope, and the coordinator ran Pilrs on the same plan set in isolation. On CMU SF, the two takeoffs agreed to within 1.8%. On bond beam LF, Pilrs was 4.1% lower — and on investigation, the senior had double-counted a typical detail that only applied to levels 3–6. On lintel steel, Pilrs was 6.3% higher, which matched the field's eventual installed quantity.
Keystone kept Quick Bid as the pricing engine and union labor cost database. Pilrs exports quantities with ASTM C90 CMU classifications, ACI 530 / TMS 402 reinforcement rules, and unit-wise grout fill volumes already resolved. The coordinator runs intake; Daniel's senior estimator reviews. The shop apprentices, who had been pulled off field work to help with manual counts during bid season, stopped getting pulled. That alone recovered ~280 craft hours per quarter.
Production rollout completed June 2025. All healthcare and higher-ed bids run through Pilrs first.
ASTM C90 unit counts, ACI 530 / TMS 402 bond beam spacing, and cell grout fill volumes come out reconciled — not padded.
Quantity deltas rerun in minutes against revised sheets — what used to be a two-day reprice is now same-day.
Exports straight into On-Center Quick Bid with union wage rates and Keystone's labor production history intact.
The waste-factor result — 18% budgeted down to 7% realized on the UPMC Passavant CMU scope — was the headline, but the more durable win was RFI response velocity. Keystone used to spend roughly 16 hours repricing scope against each major architectural revision. That number fell to 3.5 hours through the Pilrs workflow. Across the 284 RFIs on Passavant, Daniel estimates the company saved the equivalent of a full-time senior estimator's quarter.
Lintel under-quantification — historically the most expensive error mode — has been eliminated across five bids run through the platform in 2025. Zero lintel-driven crew idle events since February. On healthcare pipeline, Keystone's bid-hit rate on UPMC prequalified shortlists rose from roughly 38% to 51%, which Daniel attributes less to Pilrs and more to the capacity freed up to actually submit thorough, defensible bids on time.
Upload a plan set and see the same takeoff accuracy Keystone unlocked on hospital GMP work. 14-day trial, no credit card required.