Estimating Monthly Webinar February 2025

Alright. Let's get started. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for our estimating webinar. We have some very exciting announcements and new releases to share with you. But before we jump in, we're gonna start with some introductions. My name is Melissa Teague, and I'm a product marketing manager for estimating products, so heavy bid and heavy bid preconstruction. And my job is to really, you know, connect the dots between our products and the real world challenges that you face in heavy civil construction. So, basically, I work closely with our product team to help shape the messaging and develop resources, that help you get the most out of our software. And I will kick it over to Aaron. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Aaron Alsaus. I'm the technical product manager for HeavyBid. Looking at the guest list, I saw a lot of y'all last week, and, I've spoken with most of y'all over the phone. But in case you haven't heard heard from me or met me before, I've been with HCSS now for twelve years and been involved in heavy bid for the vast majority of that. Paul, you wanna take it away? Yeah. Hello, everybody. My name is Paul Lambert. I'm the technical product manager for, heavy bid preconstruction. Started about a year and a half ago, and, I work on everything that happens before estimating and sometimes into estimating and beyond. Alright. Thank you, guys. So today, we're gonna talk about our estimating quarterly release. So HDSS is going to start rolling out quarterly releases. So in the past, whenever we've had a new release, we would immediately roll it out to you guys. And that can be very hard for you to, you know, keep track of every release or especially if you're using multiple HCSS products. So now we're excited to roll out new releases to you four times a year for all of our products. So not just estimating, but operations and fleet products as well, so all at the same time. And so next week on Tuesday, March fourth, we'll be notifying you of the q one releases for our HTSS products. And today, we're gonna talk about a heavy bid big, heavy bid announcement, if you haven't heard already, a new user experience, the unified navigation bar, how to maximize your preconstruction workflows, the heavy bid preconstruction q one releases, the heavy bid q one releases, and then questions and answer session. And, of course, if you guys have any questions during this webinar, please just drop it in the chat. We will answer it as we go. We really wanna make sure, we answer all your questions you have. Alright. So I will kick it over to Aaron. Alright. So, whether you heard at UGM last week or you heard or you, received the email from HCSS, we are replatforming HeavyBid. What I mean by that is HeavyBid is going to the web. We are not going to be getting rid of HeavyBid desktop anytime soon. But with HeavyBid web, that allows us to do a lot of really fun things that we simply weren't able to do beforehand. You know, a few small things like a like an undo button. You know, one of the one of the things that customers have been asking for for years and years. The idea of moving it moving it to the web is essentially to give us a one stop solution for, for your bid management, your estimating, your estimating all the way through your submission. Instead of having to jump into precon and then go into a desktop application, it's all going to live under one central umbrella. Melissa, if you'd go to the next slide for me real quick, please. A few questions that always come up when we are when we're talking about the the new replatform is, will my favorite feature still be available? Without going into the the details of every feature and function in HeavyBid Desktop, more than likely, we are taking inventory of every single function and feature in desktop and figuring out where it best lives and how it's going to live on, under the new platform. When can I migrate from desktop to web? The short and sweet answer to that is not until probably twenty twenty seven. Will I be forced to migrate from desktop to web? Not anytime soon. What I like to what I like to say at UGM last week was, I hope that we do not, that you do not have any reason for being on, heavy bit desktop twenty years from now, but I also am not going to force you to migrate tomorrow. So, hopefully, sometime in that range, hopefully closer to the now section than twenty years from now, you will we will have so many functions and features that you are clamoring for that you will want to migrate. What will it cost? Short and sweet answer is I don't know what it's gonna cost yet. That is something that we are tirelessly trying to figure out, trying to figure out what it's going to cost, how we're going to package it, so that it is, the best solution for you. And can I try out this software soon? Short answer to that is yes. If you scan the QR code on your screen, that's gonna take you to a link to sign up for our beta program. The idea behind the beta program is it's going to give you, firsthand access to the new program as it's being written. Now the idea here is that by ConExpo next year, we are going to market. We're gonna be selling this new product to to customers. And if you wanna be along for the ride and the beta experience, I encourage you to sign up because it's gonna give you access to several functions and features. Or it's gonna give you access to all of the new development as it's being built. With that, gives you the ability to see, monthly webinars, hosted hosted by myself that will basically show you how all those functions are, being used, how they work, how they function, why we decided to do things the way we are doing them, and allow you to give feedback on the direction that we take the product. It's also gonna give you access to a closed group on the academy, allowing you, essentially, private access into a, a video library of all of the functions and features on the platform, and how they function. So, again, it gives you access to how the program is being written while we're actually writing it and allowing you to contribute to the direction that we take the product. It's gonna give you access to, a library of academy content, that all of our other customers that are not part of the beta program have access to, and it allows you to contribute to the direction the product is going. Right? One of the questions that came up is will the cloud based server go away, or for HeavyBid go away with the new web version? The that's a two part answer. The first answer is you do not need, the cloud based version or the the cloud based server with heavy bid web. All of the data is hosted, on Azure cloud storage. So you do not need, either HTSS cloud server or your own internal server to host the data. Now that being said, HCSS cloud will not be immediately going away. As far as I'm aware, there is no timeline on when HCSS cloud will go away, but I can guarantee it's not gonna be anytime soon. Right. We can chat more about the new platform, and we can talk about the beta program to everybody's, or as much as anybody wants when we get to the q and a at the end of the webinar. But for now, I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna turn it over to Paul, and he's gonna talk to us about, Precon. Thanks, sir. Sorry. Getting that set up there. Hopefully, everybody should be able to see. Before we jump into pre con too much, although you will see this in pre con, I do wanna talk about the unified platform navigation bar. This is something that Melissa brought up just a minute ago. This is our first step towards making it easier for the products to work together and for your workflow to be easier as you move between products. So it is a change to the way that you see, pre con represented here. We'll still have the same categories and the same tabs. You'll still be able to go to the same places. It's just that these are now part of the top. You can see them on the screenshot there, and you'll see a lot easier once we jump into, some of the new features, and I'm showing you on the the new unified platform. As Aaron mentioned, this is going to make it easier to switch between the various parts of the preconstruction phase as you're jumping from precon into the estimating side back into, KPI analysis and then into heavy job. All of these, it's going to be a lot easier with it all in one place with the future heavy bid platform, being able to seamlessly move around through there. The other thing that's going to do is, give you guys a more streamlined way to go through the different phases of the project. So even outside of estimating, being able to move from the estimating phase into the operations phase, will be easier and not have as many steps for you to jump back and forth between different websites, or anything like that. So like I said, this is the first step in moving towards the unified platform, and we'll have more updates for you, on that in the future as well. Also, before we jump into q one, we kinda wanna reiterate the connection that we have between, heavy bid, especially estimating, and heavy bid preconstruction and how, getting this information online is able to benefit you. So we have some of the different phases that you, go through in the preconstruction phase, on your screen right now from project tracking and contact management, system vendors, that sort of thing, into estimating back into, precon for estimate insights, understanding how your current estimate stacks up to previous estimates, that are similar and kinda moving through that whole process. The point of being of putting your, estimate information and syncing your, heavy bid information online is to strengthen that connection between estimate data in the preconstruction phase and beyond as it moves into, heavy job as you're getting that information back from heavy job for your production history and back into estimates. So syncing this information online, really allows a much stronger connection between all the different pieces, all the different phases that you go through so that you can use that information to make, better bids and smarter bids. So the way that we see this and, the the way that we've seen be successful is starting a project in heavy bid reconstruction. And this means from the second that you know anything about it, whether that's just the name of a project, whether that's just the project owner, whatever the case is, the second you hear about it, throw it into precon. The idea behind this is you don't win every project. You don't bid on every project. But being able to put all of your projects into one place means that as you go through, you can get a better idea of the percentage of ones that you're winning, the percentage of ones that you're bidding, whether you win or lose those, and start doing analytics on these different things so that you can go after the right projects for your company. Connecting it streamlines that, bid management, cost estimating analysis, and submission process so that you are able to get the right, projects for you and at the right price. And the nice thing about this is Precon is free. If you don't already have it, you can sign up to get Precon. It doesn't cost you anything. There is a paid version that has additional features. But if you are interested in turning on heavy bid preconstruction for free, please reach out to support. The actual setup is pretty quick and easy, and they will make sure that the, heavy bid system that you have right now, connects correctly with Precon so that you're able to start using it immediately. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. My information will be, at the end of this whole presentation, or reach out to support, and we'd love to get you set up there. With that, we have one quick poll question, which is, how are you using your syncing and archiving estimates in HeavyBid? What are you using these for? So on your screen right now, you should have a poll, and we just wanna get an idea of the types of things that you're doing with your estimates and how you're able to use, the estimates that you're syncing up in the preconstruction phase to be able to benefit you and go after the right projects. We'll give just a second for answers here as they flow in. Alright. Awesome. We have, two in the lead, copy estimates and estimate history. That's great. And it looks like a lot of you guys also are using project tracking as well. Alright. Yeah. Pretty the same across the board. And a little bit some of you guys are using contact manage management, KPI analysis, and create an estimate from project tracking. That's good to hear. Yeah. That's awesome. As we continue putting out improvements for these and, even in the current system, we encourage you, if there's something on here that you don't know much about, if the idea of contact management is new to you or understanding how you can use contact management in precon, with the estimates in heavy bid, reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you about it. Reach out to your customer success representative. They they'd be happy to walk you through it, give you a demo. But these are some of the the different options that you have when you're syncing this information up. Alright. Let's hop it into, the meat potatoes of this presentation, which is going to be the q one releases. This is what we've been working on for the past couple of months, that will be available starting on March fourth next week. So the first one in heavy bid preconstruction is calendar integration improvements. The old version of calendars, the one of the services that we use to make sure those go across, was switching from the a previous version to a newer version. And with that version upgrade that we've done, you now have faster integration between the two, and slightly improved security. I know there is a bug that is out right now that some of our customers have reported, where you're getting duplicate entries. That is something we are currently working on. We'll be pushing out a, fixed board in the near future. So don't worry. We are aware, and are currently working on that. But one of the things was this calendar integration improvement, as we look to, improve the functionality of calendars in the future as well. There are two other things, but, in this next one, archive projects, I actually want to jump into Precon software and kinda show it to you live, so that you're able to see what that looks like. So if I hop over here now, real quick, is everybody able to see the pre con screen right now, pre con home page? Aaron or Melissa? Cool. I can see it. So, currently inside the home page of Precon, anybody that has Precon, this is directly where it brings you to. So it should look pretty familiar with our project list right here. What we're going to do if we want to archive an estimate is simply go down to the estimate, go into the project detail or sorry, a project. Go into the project details here. And then up in this top right hand corner where there's three dots, we click on that, and we can archive a project. Now previously, you had the ability to delete a project. You still can, but deleting a project is permanent. Once you delete it, it's gone. And so if you're doing something like a test project or an example project or something as you're doing internal training or as you're playing around with the different fields that you might want, that's great. But sometimes you don't want a project showing up in your system anymore because it's, you know, three, four years old. You're no longer using it. It's not an active project. You've already finished it. But you don't want to delete it forever. You might still need that information later, whether that's for auditing purposes, whether that's because you might wanna do specific analysis on older projects, anything like that. And this is where the archive project comes in. So once we click confirm archive, it's now archived. And if we want to go find that, we can go over into our archive project tab here, and we can see here's our archive project, and this is when we did it. If I go into this individual project, it's going to show me everything, that I had in the project originally. You'll notice I can't change anything. In an archive project, the only things that you can do are view it as we're looking at right now, or I can unarchive it. Those are the only things. If you wanna make edits, if you wanna do anything like that, we first go into archive and confirm that on archive. And now it's back to our normal project list, and I can make any edits that I need to make. I can, upload files, whatever I need to do from within here. Now for most of our customers, if you are planning on archiving projects, we assume that you are probably going to need to archive more than one, and especially if you've been a Precon user for a while, and you have a couple hundred, a couple thousand projects, doing one at a time would be quite a pain. So we've also added in bulk on our or sorry, bulk archiving projects. So this time, in my project list on this default page, under this three dot menu, I'm going to show bulk operations. I can narrow it down to the types of projects that I want to archive. So for instance, I can switch my bid date to only be from twenty twenty two and before, and then simply click on this button right here, and it's going to do everything on this page. If I want to only do some of the ones, I can then go in and select individual ones to either, add to this list or remove from this list. And with when I'm happy with the projects that I have archived, I can click archive projects, and it will move all of them over to this archive projects area. You can see right now, I don't have any in there, so it's showing done. So that is archive projects. It helps you clean up the data that you have. It will improve performance because we're not loading in projects that are no longer being used, that are no longer active, and it will make your data a little bit cleaner so that you're only focusing on the projects that you want to see in your analytics. The other thing that we have to look at is with contact management. So, for anybody who hasn't seen contact management before, this is essentially currently an online Rolodex. It definitely does a lot more than that. We have a lot of integration between contacts and, the projects themselves. And this also, for anybody who has enabled it, is your system vendors list. So if you are using the contact management system vendors, this is going to include all of your information from there, including things like whether or not it's bonded, minority status percent, all of the information that you're looking for from your system vendors. We are planning on making a lot of improvements to the contact management system, but the one that we have to show you today for, the quarter one release next week is the ability to add interactions to specific contacts. So what this means is I have reached out to a contact or they've reached out to me. We talked about something. I'm now able to log that interaction, talking about what was discussed during that, when it happened, who was involved, all of that good stuff, directly from in here. And more specifically, anybody within my business unit is able to see that, which means if I, as a business development representative, call up somebody and we talk about, setting up a potential meeting for next week, and then I go on, PTO or I am sick, other people are able to see what happened during that meeting or they're able to see the last thing that we discussed. Like I said, this is anybody within the business unit, so that it's not just stuck to me looking at my own interactions. Before I jump in and show exactly what that looks like, I wanna direct your attention over here. We have this latest interaction section. Let me explain that a little bit so it's easier to see. And so we can see even when was the last time that I talked to them. For these two, for Amanda and for Paul, it was pretty recent. But the last time we talked to Aaron was February of twenty twenty four. That might be worth reaching out and seeing, hey. We haven't talked in a while. Just wanted to check-in, see how you're doing. Maybe they moved companies, in which case I wanna update the contacts within my company. And to make this even easier, just like the rest of Precon, you can actually drag this up and sort by it. And so we can see here's all the people that we talked to in, with the latest interaction in twenty twenty four. Here are all the people with the latest interaction in twenty twenty five. Here are all the people that we don't have any logged interactions for. And, of course, we can narrow this down if I wanna say show me the different quarters or the different months or weeks instead of organizing by year. But let's look at what it looks like to add and view these interactions. So if I go in next to Paul and I click on manage and then interactions, it's going to pop up with the different interactions that we've had. Now right now, I have it sorted by, the oldest to newest down at the bottom. If I wanna swap that, I can just click this little arrow, and now it's showing me here's the most recent interaction. I can also switch that over if I want to see different people who added it. So in this case, we can see on all of these, these were added by me because I was the one that typed these in. But I can add this on behalf of somebody else. If I know somebody else had a meeting, I can add it for them and have them come back later and edit it to update with more updated information about that meeting. I can also do it by interaction type. So if I wanna see all of the phone calls or all of the in person meetings or all of the emails and so on, I can do that, which makes it even easier if I'm trying to look for a specific interaction. So here we have the interactions that have happened in the past. If I wanna add in a new one, I click add interaction. It's going to ask for the time and date of that. It defaults to right now, but I can change this either to the past if this happened last week and I'm just now getting around to adding it in, or even to the future. We don't necessarily expect people to add things in the future, but we know everybody's got different cases. So if you want to add an interaction for somebody else in the future as a placeholder and have them update it once they actually have that meeting, that's also a possibility. We also track, who's added it. So in this case, we can see it was added by me because I am the person currently logged into here. If I want to say it's on behalf of somebody else, I can throw that in the interaction notes. And we have the method just in case you want to narrow that down, whether that's in person, over text, some other version. So in this case, we'll just say it was a phone call, and they were just calling to say hi. We save that, and it's going to update over here. And now you can see because I have it set from newest to oldest, it popped up at the top added by me with all the information I put in. I can also, both myself and anybody else in the business unit who has, permissions for editing contacts, can edit this interaction and say they said, hi to Aaron too. Or I can delete this interaction if this is something that shouldn't be on this contact or, is not relevant as an interaction. And we just delete that, and now it's gone. So these were the three main things that happened in precon this quarter. We obviously have more updates for you next quarter. If you have any questions about it, throw them in the q and a, and I'll be happy to talk about them at the end of this session. If we don't have time for that or if you have a very specific question you wanna ask, feel free to reach out to me. And with that, I will turn it back over to Aaron. Hey, Paul. Before we oh, never mind. Amanda Amanda answered it. I was gonna have a one of the questions came up. Are the interactions project specific? They are not currently, project specific. Right now, the only, filter that we have for it is by contact. We are already planning in the future to be able to tag specific projects with it so that you can say, for instance, when Paul confirmed the project's still on track and to meet the deadline, to be able to say that was for project one two three four. That is not currently available, but that is something that we are planning on doing in the future. K. And, are you able to import these interactions for customers that have tracked them previously in other other sources? That is not something that is currently available on this release. But, again, it's something that we are looking at adding for the future. K. And, last question. Is this available for full or limited? This should be available for both, I believe. I will double check, but let let me get back to you on that because I don't wanna make promises, and my head's a little bit full of a thousand different things right now. So, I will get back to you on that immediately after the webinar. Alright. So with that being said, I'm gonna I'm gonna steal the screen here. Let's see. It's my screen sharing. Let's see here. There we go. K. And everybody should be able to see, HeavyBid. Alright. Perfect. So the idea that, for HeavyBid twenty twenty five, the main theme was essentially taking a product that we have iterated on and iterated on over almost the last forty years, and we wanted to make a release that was almost, solely driven based on customer feedback. So you might see, some of these items are not the groundbreaking release item that you might be thinking, but they are all items that you as the customer have requested either through the community, through the ideas portal, through, town hall at UGM, or a a phone call or email, with myself. So I'll go through. We'll we'll demo each of these functions, and we'll talk a little bit about it. So the first item is a mass update to the workers' comp code in the activity code book. So what I mean by that is if I go to the activity code book, and if you look at any of these fields, something such as the description, anything that has a grid view in the program, so think, tree view in the non crew resources, think spreadsheet view, think any of the setup menus, You can do a mass select. And in certain fields, you can do a mass update. Certain fields don't lend themselves to a mass update such as the description of a of a activity code, but workers' comp code is an item that is shared, or not shared, but many activities utilize the same workers' comp code. And previously, to update it, you had to go in one at a time. That is slow and inefficient. So, last year at UGM, someone asked, and, if you click, drag, and highlight multiple cells, you now have the ability to mass change. And forgive me. I don't know, all of the workers' comp codes off top of my head. But if I put in a a workers' comp value, I can update multiple items all at once. Moving on. This was an item that was, asked at town hall last year, and it was the ability to add an additional filter value to the change activity data. So if we go to the edit menu and go to change activity data, what the customer asked was having the ability to filter this list of activities to only additive or non additive activities. We have lots of abilities or we have a lot of ability to make mass changes to different values within the edit activity data, something such as the non additive flag. But previously, we didn't have the ability to filter down to that specific value. So under filters and activity filters, we added an add, non add filter here. So what that gives us the ability to do is filter down the list to only show additive activities, non additive activities, or to show all. And that's just gonna reduce the the number of activities you see on the screen. As a side benefit, this filter this whole filter box here is used in more than one screen. It's actually utilized in the tree view and the spreadsheet view. So as an unintended benefit, anybody who works in the tree view and the spreadsheet view, which is all of you, you can now go down to the filters. And under the activity filters, you'll see that same ad, non ad. So I can filter down my my bid items, my bid item activities to see only the additive or non additive. That's a great tool, in my opinion for the estimate review. I can go and I can review my non ad activities, make sure that they are supposed to be non ad or flip the additive status if I need to without having to come through all of my other additive activities. Moving right along, we're gonna talk about estimate history. We've we've mentioned that a few times in this webinar. And one of the items that always seems to come up is estimate history and production history. They're great tools. They're something that y'all as a customer seem to thoroughly enjoy and utilize. A few years ago, under production history, I had the ability or I added or not I, but, we as HCS added the ability to drill down within, within a job under your production history analysis and see the time cards that made up that, that made up that job as well as the crew that was on each individual time card. Well, when we demoed that at town hall, it took all of about three seconds for someone to raise their hand and go, can I get that added to estimate history? Well, now within estimate history, I have that same functionality. So whenever I am reviewing any of my, estimate history analysis, I can click the ellipses for the crew, and it's gonna actually bring up my crew. So it's gonna show me all the labor and equipment, all of the quantities for those respective labors and equipment, the unit of measure, the number of pieces that are on that, crew, as well as any hour adjustments that were made, for that particular crew on that particular estimate. Giving you much greater granularity and much better ability to determine how I actually estimated that in the past. So when you look at all of these quantities and you see massive quantity variances here, so eight point seven five acres versus a hundred and eighty acres versus five hundred acres. I can drill down and see, did I use the same crew or did I adjust my crew? Did I add extra pieces of equipment? Did I add an extra operator to account for that increased quantity? Aaron, we did have, one question just come in. And it's, is heavy bid twenty twenty five for SQL available? Yes. It is. Thank you. So anyone unfamiliar at SQL, the the SQL version, which utilizes a SQL back end, for your data, yes, it's utilizing the same update that the standard, HeavyBid system is utilizing. So if you go to the community and go to my, my software, you'll see HeavyBid twenty twenty five, right now, and you can download it. It's the same download, whether you're utilizing the the standard, file format or you're utilizing the SQL file format. Jumping over to the next item is, actually under estimate review, and it's under the resource tab. For any of you eagle eyed folks in here, you will see that under the tax OT, less than a hundred percent or greater than a hundred and fifty percent, we made a very, very small edit. One of our contract trainers, made it a point last year at UGM, to get on a soapbox and basically say in every one of his classes that I needed to change this. And I stood in a room in front of a hundred people, and I said, I will put it in the next version of heavy bid. Well, here we go. The the tax OT in heavy bid twenty twenty four dot one and prior, it simply stated the tax percent. That does not fully encompass what is what this field actually shows. The reason it needs to say tax OT is because it also includes labor. It doesn't just show material tax percentages. It shows, labor overtime percentages as well. So to be, more transparent and basically give an accurate representation of what data is in this field, we needed to modify that text. So, again, not a big change, but something to basically make y'all's job a little bit easier in reading what data is available to you. This next item is something that, y'all essentially called us out on. It was something we missed. So under the estimate recap report, so if I go to my reports and I go look at my summary reports, there's an estimate recap classic and there's an estimate recap reports plus report. Well, y'all called us out and told us that we were missing a critical, a critical field in this report. And that critical field was the adjustments for bid takeoff differences. This function is in the classic report, but it is not in or it was not in the reports plus report. And this basically tells us the differences that are in our estimate based on the bid takeoff difference differences under our bid item setup. No. This is an item I was slightly surprised by, under the customized bid proposal. When we're going in and we're adding footnotes, and we're going in, we're adding a wall of text, we're making a change. Yeah. If I accidentally click no or I click cancel here, beforehand, it just it closed the screen and you lost your changes. Apparently, that is a very large problem for a lot of estimators because when someone brought it up at town hall, I think almost the entire room raised their hand and said this was a problem. So to help mitigate that problem, we gave you, we gave you a little warning pop up that said, if I've added any changes and I haven't saved them and I exit out of here, you're gonna get a warning that says changes exist in the footnotes. Do you want to save them? And it's just a simple yes or no checkbox. You do not get that if you click okay, but only if you click cancel and you have made changes. Few other changes, that have come up. This one came up from a from an end user, and they made a very compelling case. Made a lot of sense. Under the exchange export to heavy job and accounting, under the export to heavy job, we actually added an option here. And it says, do not export non ad extracted resources. So what do I mean by that? When you are in the extract resources, I have the ability to extract additive or non additive resources. When I send that over to HeavyJob, HeavyJob doesn't care whether it's additive or nonadditive. So in the past, we've just sent the list of resources or the the the list of cost codes, and resources for those items. Well, the customer pointed out that that basically just junks up the the MSE list in heavy job, making it more difficult to find the correct materials for your installed and received materials. So we went ahead. We added a checkbox here. So now if you check that checkbox, even if I extract the resource, the materials list will not be updated with our non ad extracted resources, basically saving you the trouble of having to comb through those when you're doing your installed and received materials. This next item is something that, how do I put this kindly? I received a few messages on the ideas portal, on the community, my email, my phone calls, support. What other methods of communication do I have? Pigeon mail, snail mail, all that good stuff? We made a change in heavy bid twenty twenty four that basically gave you the ability to see the alternate quantity, the alternate unit, and give you the alternate unit cost. Part of doing that was under the activity productivity categories, we added an alternate quantity version of our same productivity categories. In order to do that, we needed to expand the gap between the, different values. Apparently, that caused a lot of confusion because what ended up happening was for the non alternate quantities, the the category headers ended up sitting next to the wrong, input box or the wrong value box. And it caused a lot of confusion, something that I did not take into account in any capacity. So for twenty twenty five, we made a a a simple fix. We shifted all of the text to the right. So now it's always going to sit right next to the the value that the header represents. Hopefully, during the review process, that'll make it a lot easier to determine what value represents what. Erin, we have one question. It's can the do not export nonadd extracted resources checkbox be prechecked sorry, be pre prechecked as a system preference? It cannot be as a system preference. And at the end of the session, we can test this. But if you set it up in the master estimate, it will probably transfer over. We can test that a little bit later. I have not personally tested that yet, but we can see if that works for you. Alright. One other small change. I received a call, for anyone here who does any kind of, text dot work. We received a call from Amtech, and they updated their DOT format a little bit. So under the import from DOT, under the DOT entities, you will see two Amtech imports. You'll see the original AMTEC import, and you'll see the new import utilizing the twenty twenty four format. We kept the old import because there's still a lot of existing, lettings out there that might still utilize the old format. Speaking, speaking to Amtech, they might still be around for the next eight months to a year, so it doesn't make sense to remove that format just yet. As part of our continuing integration, with with, outside partners and outside vendors, one of the one of the people that or one of the companies we are integrating with is a company called Bulk Exchange. They're a bulk material, supplier. Well, they give you the the quotes for bulk material prices. They're not the actual supplier. But they have a pre formed export that we need to be able to ingest. The ultimate goal is to be able to do this more seamlessly. But in the interim, under the quote summary, we utilized the ability to use our import quote prices tool. So under the import quote prices, you'll now see a template. For anyone not utilizing, bulk exchange, you still have a custom template, and that's still the default. But if you want to, you can select bulk exchange, find your file, and I'm gonna here we go. And what this is going to do is it's already it already has the bulk exchange format, so it bypasses the mapping. So the mapping is, for anyone who's ever utilized the import from Excel where I map what column represents what value, I bypass that stage, allowing me to go straight into the mapping of the results. So now I can take my unit price of any item from my, import sheet and map it to the unit price of an item in my quote sheet, where beforehand, again, you had to go to through the mapping stage. So just an attempt to try and save you a few extra keystrokes. Right? The the last item I wanna talk about before we move into before we move into q and a, is a rather large change, and it is the ability to sync quote prices up to pre con. Now what do I mean by that? In the past, last couple years, in fact, this has been more of a in a beta trial. But in twenty twenty five, we've we've opened it up to everybody. In, in HeavyBid, in your quote summary, you will see a new button added right underneath the estimate has changed function, and it is sync quote prices. If you are currently utilizing estimate history, which, looking at the survey results from earlier, most of y'all are. You can utilize this the second you turn on, or the second you update to twenty twenty five. For anyone who is not utilizing it, under my system preferences, if I jump down to web applications and estimate archive and estimate history, all I need to do is enable estimate history in HeavyBid. So I need to allow my estimate data to be uploaded to estimate history and QMS, QMS being our quote management system. So once I have that enabled, I can click the sync quote prices. I get a nice little button that says I'm gonna be, I'm gonna sync my estimate data to estimate history. I click continue. From here on out, we have automated functions. So anytime that I go into quote summary, anytime that I, close, close a quote sheet or exit out of the estimate, we automatically sync that data back up to Precon for analysis. Now what can you do with that data once you've synced it? Within Precon, I can jump over to my estimate insights, section. I can find any of my estimates. In this case, my synced estimate is my one utility estimate. Within my estimate details, I can come over to the bottom left, and I'm going to see quote management. This is going to allow me to be able to see all of my quote data for that estimate in precon. Now that does a couple things. One, from most basic standpoint, is it saves a it saves a license, for anybody in estimating. So anybody that's in heavy bid, on bid day knows licenses are are a precious commodity. It's something that you don't necessarily wanna give out to to everybody, but it's something that everybody needs access to. Well, now I can go up into precon, not utilize my, my heavy bid license, and take a look at all of my estimate data. So I can go ahead and I can look at my estimate folder. I can see what vendors are in are in that folder. I can see my vendor totals. I can see my selected vendors. I can see if they're a minority vendor. I can even jump in and go a little bit deeper. I can see all of my quoted items, so I can see my vendor. I can see what they're actually, quoting, and I can see the the unit price. I can also see any of my other vendors, and I that allows me to be able to see all of my totals. If for any reason you like the look and feel of the traditional quote sheet structure in desktop, I can go and I can click see my full quote sheet. This is gonna give you a much more, familiar looking feel to those that are more comfortable with the desktop experience. Over here are your resource values, and to the right of that are your vendor quotes. You have your unit, your unit cost quote along with your totals down below. Now this allows anyone reviewing those quote folders to be able to look at the data and make adjustments in desktop. It'll allow, someone to call into an estimator that's currently utilizing desktop and allow them to make changes. This is kind of the the first phase of what we're looking to do with this. Eventually, we're going to be able to bring in, pricing from outside vendors and update our quote sheets within QMS and eventually allow that data to be brought back into the estimate. Again, not automatically. It's something that someone will have to allow on the desktop side, but, we want to make it easier and more intuitive for y'all to be able to take the quotes from your suppliers and bring those quotes into HeavyBid. Alright. Alyssa, I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna turn it back over to you, and then we'll, go through a a q and a. Alright. Let me share my screen here. Does anyone have any questions? I know we have five five minutes left left to this webinar. I wanted to I wanted to take a moment. I forgot a very crucial bit, and I wanted to talk about it. So for anyone that was at UGM last year and has been to any of my webinars previously, we are sunsetting the classic export to accounting in heavy bid twenty twenty six. If you are still utilizing the classic export to accounting and you're on heavy bid twenty twenty four or heavy bid twenty twenty four dot one or soon to be heavy bid twenty twenty five, you will see bright red text in the bottom left that says export to a heavy job in accounting classic will be discontinued in heavy bid twenty twenty six. I encourage you, if you're still utilizing the classic, to please call support, and we will get you migrated over to the new ETA. There is no additional cost with the migration. But once you, update to heavy bid twenty twenty six dot o, next year, you will no longer have access to that classic screen if you're still utilizing it. Alright. Melissa, I'm sorry for jumping in. Back to you. No worries. Okay. Alright. So, I just dropped in the chat as well. If y'all have any questions, I know we have three minutes left. If we can't get to them all, we'll definitely email you after this. But any questions, please drop it in the chat. We're happy to answer. This is your time to really ask anything you need and, take advantage of having the technical product managers, here to answer your questions. So Alright. So I see the the first question. Is the is the quote sync part of the free or paid version of Precon? Paul, do you wanna take that one? Yeah. So the quote sync is part of the free version of, precon currently. On the second part of the question, John, I might need to connect with you after as to what you mean for the quote syncing with project management. We definitely do have several things that we're planning on working on that more closely link quotes with projects. But I'd be interested in talking with you after to see exactly what you're thinking about and give you a a much more thorough answer on, exactly what to expect. Going back to one of the questions from earlier, is the do not export non ad extracted resources, is that can that be checked as part of a system preference? Again, the answer to that is no, but I did just go back and test. If I make that change in my master estimate and then create a new estimate off of that master, that preference, does come forward. So if I set it in my master, moving forward, that checkbox will be checked by default. And we did have one, question. It says unrelated to today's topics, but they noticed under activities that there was a risk in user defined tab. Yeah. So let me let me steal the screen back. Did this once. Where did it just here we go. Alright. So what the user is referencing is under the activity information here, next to the miscellaneous tab, there is a tab for risk and user defined. The user defined tab basically allows me to have additional user defined quantities and user defined check boxes. Those values can be used in a number of places, pivot reports, export to accounting, a few other places. And they're basically for you to be able to do whatever it is that you want. They're usually defined as best answer I got for them. They they allow you to do kinda whatever it is that you want with them and get the value out of them that you deem appropriate. Within the estimate preferences and headings, I can actually rename my activity user defined quantity headings and my user defined checkbox headings to utilize those as whatever I deem appropriate. At UGM, this last week, a user actually had a really good idea for the user defined checkboxes, and that was as a secondary, activity review checkbox. So the way that they do the estimate review is they have the unreviewed checkbox, and then they want to utilize a final review. They renamed one of the user defined checkboxes to final review, and they're marking all of their activities as they create them as unreviewed. And then when they do their final review, they'll check it off as final reviewed. So, again, you can utilize them for whatever it is that you want. Risk risk is the risk analysis module that we utilize in HeavyBid. Basically, it allows you to run a Monte Carlo simulation based on values that you plug in throughout your estimate, for different risk types, such as, production rate risk, cost risk, or cost factor risk. You can also set up any items as a risk contingency. And, basically, what it allows you to do is run a report that, again, runs a Monte Carlo simulation in the background and tells you based on how many contingency dollars you have in your bid, do you have enough money to account for your potential risk in your estimate? So you get different, different variables. Do I get eighty percent risk, ninety percent, ninety five percent? Basically, what that means is utilizing worst case scenario, do I have enough money to account for eighty percent of my potential risk, ninety percent, ninety five percent, whatever number it is that you're actually comfortable with? Now that is something that we have a a previous webinar on that goes far more in-depth into the the utilization of that particular function. Aaron, there was also a question there, with people not having seen those tabs before. Is there a certain level of, or a certain license type in HeavyBid to have those options? Yes. So the risk tab is a comprehensive only feature. The user defined tab, I can't remember off the top of my head if that's comprehensive or advanced. But that, I believe that is one of those two functions or one of those two levels. You know what? I actually have an advanced system on another screen that we can pull up and confirm that. Okay. Yeah. So the user defined is also part of the comprehensive system. When I'm sharing the screen, I can't see the questions being asked. Are there any other questions coming up? I do not see any. Well, thank you guys, so much for attending the webinar. Again, if you have any other questions, please reach out to Aaron or Paul or myself, and we'll get right back to you on those. And that is it for q one releases. We hope you all have a great day, and thank you for your time. Alright. Bye, guys.