Look at Production History While Estimating
HeavyBid allows you to use historical data to fine tune your estimating based on actual production quantities coming from the field. For instance, in Clear and Grub Medium right now I'm at current units per shift of 4.0. If I click the binoculars and open up our production history system, you can see in the first box what quantity I'm doing in this activity, the units, there's my production of four, and how many man hours per unit. Next to it I have the average of the historical data shown in the grid below. In the grid you can see that I have a couple of units that don't match. If I uncheck the tons and the lump sum item, it updates my historical data so now I'm showing I normally complete 7.7 units per shift, or acres per shift. That's pretty far away from our four units per shift. If I decide that I want to use that quantity in my estimating to get a little bit current with what the field is actually able to accomplish, on the right I have Write to Current Activity. I can copy X number of jobs back to the activity notes, so that I can justify what my productions actually are. I can also take back the rate of the average, the 7.7 units per shift. I'm going to click Return History. What that has done in HeavyBid, is it corrected my rate to the 7.7 acres per shift, as well as, if I go into my notes, I can now see that my average is 2.83 acres and I usually have from one to five acres to do. Here are the three jobs, that all averaged out to the 7.7 acres per shift. If I am not using a coding structure that is consistent, I can also do this search in another way. If I come down here, to my line treatment subgrade, and click on this stabilization subgrade, you can see I'm currently at 4700 units per hour of square yards. Again if I click my binoculars, it's gonna go out and try and do a search for that. It doesn't find any data. I can then go in and type in subgrade. Do a search on that, and I have plenty of returns. I can see I'm highlighted on units that don't match, so I can go in and remove those. And as I do so, it's going to start calculating a new average for me. Again, my production's off by a little bit, if I wanna return this production, so that I'm current with what the field can actually accomplish in an hour, then I can come over here, again, I'm gonna return X number of found items, as well as the production of 6,000 units per hour, and it's going to go through, update my crew based on that, as well as put that in the notes again. So, now I have proof when I'm going through a job review or bid review, this is why I've made my production what I have. If you're not a user of our heavy job product, we can also do this based on what you're estimated averages are. If I come into my road grade work, and look at my erosion control, and go back to the binoculars, this is our cost history system based on past estimate. I'm filtering down to the activity, that has the erosion stone control. My quantity that I'm currently doing is 50, and I have a variance of plus or minus 25%. I can change those, if I wanna increase the range of targets. So now you can see I have several items that I've worked up using the erosion control. In the upper right, I can then calculate the average, very similar to the production history except this is based on what I've estimated before. You can see here I'm running an average of 2.5 units per man hour. I can then copy these averages back to the note. The same as I did. Copy the average calculations back. Now when I go into the notes for that activity, you can see everything based on my previous estimates, the total quantity, total man hours, et cetera. And I was running about 2.5 units per man hour before. So, I may wanna come in and change this three to 2.5, and now I'm in line with where my past estimates have been.