Heavy bid that makes my job easier day to day, mainly because of the data entry, I think.
The biggest one is the quick sub and material entry. I'm able to go through and select the different bid items. A lot of our work is unit price, and so we the agencies, give us different bid items, and we're able to pick those different bid items that the subs will be in and quickly input them in the price. And then those will go into an immediate cheat, and, we don't really have to mess with those items very much. And, it cuts down probably about fifty percent of the data entry time that we have to put in.
I've been using it for probably thirteen years now, and, it's a necessary tool for us to bid our jobs efficiently in A lot of times, the owners and municipalities that create the bid forms in, in our industry, they like to lump sum a lot of their check. So heavy bed gives us the capability to detail it out and produces many, child items, that we need to facilitate all the different division that are in our work. So we'll have, you know, multiple children in the process and break it down, you know, the tree is very expensive. In what we do. And it helps us to roll up that cost and to, you know, lump sum items that the owners limit you to. So I think that's really helped this and being able to make the changes that we needed to do our work, to be able to understand, you know, our activity codes that would correspond to our division.
It's a one to one correspondence that the guys, the estimators are used to seeing, and they can understand so they make sure that their cost is correct.
Basically, the way we have our system set up, we have copy slash library estimates which help us populate, the estimate pretty quick.
It does really help us stay tremendously consistent. We we do a lot of negotiated work that's multi phase, a lot of similar elements.
We're able to set the job up once and use some copy commands and other commands within the program. So when we have changes or different versions of plan sets, it it's relatively any one of the estimators can step in and know exactly the other one was talking about or or working through, you know, with all the, you know, different availability and note, note functions and all that other stuff within within the Estimate system.
For me, best feature about heavy bid is honestly I think the quote system. It's so easy to analyze the different subs and be able to capture all their escalation, all their additives, and all the, mobilizations, and, and all the different terms and conditions that the subs and suppliers put into their quotes. And we're able to capture those the quote system and and truly analyze apples to apples, who is, going to be the most cost effective option for us. I like the functionality of it, like self perform analysis, sub vendor comparisons.
I know some people still use Excel or do, self perform analysis on the side. We don't. We we analyze our quotes in the quote system. We do self perform analysis, a nice quick toggle.
Just flip the switch, and it switches self perform ourself.
So it feels great when you see all these projects and realize, okay, well, no, now it's no longer an issue of whether we have time and the resources to set this up, but now we can actually pick the best job, based on our competitive advantage.
It's the right way to do the work
