Before the Bid: Put It All Together - Your New Estimating Process Starts Here

All right. Well, let's get started here. So thank you for joining and welcome back everyone. So this is our final session for Before the Bid webinar series. So as you know, over the past two to three months, we have been doing this series where we walked through how heavy bid preconstruction works hand in hand with heavy bid desktop to give you more visibility across your project pipeline, automate those repetitive manual tasks, and surface insights that help you build faster bids. And so today, the purpose of this webinar is just to pull it all together in this final session. So we'll recap the key takeaways, show you complete workflow and action and share how your team can start adopting this process right away. And so whether you've attended every session or you're just joining us for the first time, this one is where we're going to show you where we're putting it all together. So you'll know exactly how to take the next step towards a more connected data driven estimating process. So the agenda for today oh, we're going to start with some introductions. My apologies. So my name is Melissa Teague, and I'm the product marketing manager over our estimating products. So heavy bid preconstruction, heavy bid desktop, and the new heavy bid coming out soon and my job is to just really connect with you guys our customers to really understand your needs your pain points and make sure I'm creating materials and webinars like this that will help you better use our products. And then I'll kick it over to Erika. Hello, everyone. My name is Erika Vincent, and I am the TPM for preconstruction project tracking. So, today I will be sharing you my knowledge and showing all the steps, how we can set you up for success. Thank you. Here you go, Melissa. Thanks, Erika. And then we also have Aaron here, the TPM technical product manager for heavy bid desktop. So if you have any questions regarding that, he's here as well to answer those. And as always drop your questions in the chat as we go we'll answer them as we're teaching you this. So today we're going to recap syncing your systems and estimate insights. We're going to talk about the end to end workflow in action. We're going to touch on some common questions and pitfalls. And we're going to go into the adoption roadmap. And of course questions and answers at the end as well. Recapping what is HeavyBid reconstruction for anyone that doesn't know. So it's a web based tool for project tracking and estimate management. And it's also it was built and it's meant to be used simultaneously with heavy bid Desktop. So when you connect HeavyBid Preconstruction and HeavyBid Desktop, you're going to streamline the whole bid management, cost estimating, analysis, and submissions into one seamless workflow. And this tool is free for all HCSS customers. So you can turn it on today. You can call support and get that turned on. So just know that as you're thinking about using it. And so the future of estimating what we've been saying is it's project first. And this is because the future heavy bid so the new heavy bid will be rolling out next year. It's all going to start with entering those project details in the very beginning. So that's going to be your project tracking and preconstruction. And then when you connect HeavyBid preconstruction with HeavyBid, it gives you all this functionality. So project tracking calendar management contact management estimate insights and then of course doing all of your cost estimating and then reviewing that estimate and submitting it And so one of the big things when we talk about connecting the two is syncing your estimates. Syncing your estimates in heavyweight desktop to pre construction and so this is going to allow you to pull all of your historical cost data, your historical price data, and your project scope patterns. And so seeking this is going to avoid retyping and surface surfaces estimate history just for better go no vote decisions. And so as we all know, most bad bids happen because of lack, not a lack of effort, because of lack of visibility and so estimate insights in HeavyBid preconstruction is going to give you that context to what you're bidding based on real data. And so with estimates you'll be able to spot outliers you can clean up your code books you can prioritize high impact materials all those little details that matter and All right, and so now we're going to kick it over to Erika to do a live work walkthrough of all the steps that's involved with connecting the two. Awesome. Thank you, Melissa. The first step in preconstruction, when a lot of get that awesome login, because it's for free, you just call support and they, activate it for you. You go in and you would, set up a new project. You can set up project details. You can create project statuses, you can create lots of custom areas to help you track different projects that you're working on or that are in the pipeline. You can see a little screenshot on different fields that some of our users are using or we are setting up, but I'll show hands on later on. So I'll just go through the slides now. And then in the next slide, Melissa, this one is So Melissa mentioned that HeavyBit Desktop, you can sync it with preconstruction. And the syncing is an easy step. There is a couple of things you have to do in the HeavyBit Desktop. And then in preconstruction, you just have to map. You have to map the fields that are exactly what you are having in desktop, like project name to project name in preconstruction. You also set the source of truth. And you just do that step once and you are good to go. Another step that it's not a step, it's something that preconstruction has. And it comes to various dashboards. Preconstruction is full of dashboards. The three that you see here, we also have charts and maps and other things that you can set up to make the view easy for you. But these three awesome dashboards that are available under Estimate Insights, they will provide you the KPI comparison, the material impact and a code book cleanup. A cool, local thing that you can see in code books, what you're using, reports, missing code book items, and I'll show that later on too. So exciting, exciting things. Step four, a very cool feature, maybe not everyone's telling you about, cloud. Cloud is free. When you are archiving your estimates, maybe you have been in HeavyBit Desktop for many, many years and you have created so many estimates. You can archive them, and then you can store them in the cloud. If you need to back it up, it's there in the cloud, it's free, and it comes with your subscription. Another cool thing about archiving and syncing in preconstruction, you can access those archives estimates and historically compare all that data with the estimates that you're currently working on. Yeah, pretty cool. Step five, here's that archiving. Archiving you do in the beginning, it's not really a step five. But in HeavyBid Desktop, these are the steps outlined on the slide that you can see. You would go in and you would set which estimates you want to be archived. And you can do it as often as you want, click refresh, and it's ready to go. And the other part is also on the next slide, we give you steps on how you can sync the HeavyBid desktop with pre construction. So, this is that first step that when you get access to pre construction, you can go ahead and start doing creating some of the projects to play with the pre construction. But this is the step that syncs the information. That's how HeavyBit Desktop talks to, pre construction. So, let me now quickly share my screen and I can show you all those little steps. Let's see. Give me a second. Okay. Screen one. Okay. This is the step where I just talked about, where we are going to help both softwares see how they talk to each other. So, you would go into just a second, I have this bar in front of me that Zoom is just not letting me. Okay. We go into tools, preferences, system, and lots of cool things here. But we want to see web applications and estimate archive history. Just make sure these two check marks are checked and you are good to go. You click okay. And the other part where we talked in slides about archiving, it's under file, archive. You go in here. I don't have any estimates to archive since I archived it, but you would go archive estimates, type in your password. If you don't have a password or your password is not working, talk to your admin, talk to your head estimator, and that will connect. But you type it in, connect, and then, because I didn't enter one, you can choose which of the estimates you want to archive. So, we did all these steps. I got a bunch of estimates in here. Now, I want to sync everything. We synced it. And I am in preconstruction. Let's see. Okay. So, when you come to pre construction, have, this is the landing page projects. This is where the list of all your projects is gonna be. My list looks different than yours because I used a template that I saved when I made modifications in my display screen. I used filters. I also used headers to organize my information. You can see these filters. You can add different filters in that area. I have an estimator type of work added as my filters, and then I can always choose more information. Let's say I want to know all of the projects that one of my estimators is working. I choose that estimator, and I can see all that information right in here, I minimized. And my projects are organized by type of work. So, I have prospective project status, not type of work project. And then I can see in, I see project status, I see type of work, and then I see a project. Okay. And as I mentioned, you can set this as a template. So, once you set your view, you either click save, so it would save to the current template that I have, or you create a new template. You click on save a new template, give it a name, and it will be in the system for you to see next time you come. I don't want to use this view, so I will clear everything. Another cool thing in this, you can see the scroll bar on the right. You can navigate. You can drag and drop items you want to see first. Maybe I want to drag a bid total, be a little bit closer before. Maybe I want to know bid date or closer to the project name. Also, can add unique columns when you go in three buttons at the top, click on the showhide columns, and then you can choose from all of the available columns that you can add in. You can scroll down search, you can go by section and go in and add. Maybe I want to know what is my pre bid date. I select, I close, and pre bid dates right here, shows up right here. So, pretty cool. Another cool feature that pre construction has when you're looking at the project list, you can export. You can export all this information into CSV, PDF, or just bid results to a CSV file. Let me show you what this looks like. I'm gonna export it to the PDF while it is downloading. I am gonna show you right here. So, is the view that it would look like in the PDF. You can print it, you can manipulate it the way you want it. Of course, if you exported it into Excel, you can do some other manipulations in the Microsoft Excel. This is once again project list. The way we see projects, we go into the project by clicking on the project itself. So, we're clicking on the project name, and you can see all the information within the project. The this is a project detail page. I have it when you first come to preconstruction, there are default fields that are set up for you. But you can customize and add additional fields that you want that works for your company, for you, and the list goes on. I can also collapse all, expand all. Once again, three buttons right here, download PDF. This part, download PDF, is a little bit different. This one, you can actually download either all of the sections that you have created or just specific sections that you want to see. So, we click download PDF. And then once it downloads, it is taking its time to download. So, once it downloads, I can show you. Perfect, thank you. And here it is. This is the view of a project itself. So, this will help you view information too on the PDF and share it with other people in your company. This is, like I mentioned, unique. I set it up for my company, what works for me. The way you do that is pretty cool. You go to cut I went back to my project list or project tab. On the left side, there is customized setup page. This is the area where you customize your sections. As you can see, project details is one of my section, documentation. Another one. You can drag and drop items from the left into different sections. You can create a section itself, brand new section. If I scroll down, I want a new section over here. I drag it and drop it here. I can name it dates. Then I can add different fields that I have in here. Of course, we have a date field, I drag and drop. I can name it a pre meeting date, more whatever it's needed, I close it. I can click and drag in selection list. Maybe I can create important dates to note. And then I can create a selection field by creating values. I can do add and value Monday meeting. And then you can do web display as one value, and you can change the desktop display to be a different value. And you can go on and customize it, the different items that we have in here. Once you're done customizing, you click on save, and this will save my information. So, if I go back into projects, and I click on any of my project details or projects, I scroll down and I can see that here it is. I have created a section that's called dates. I can close and blah blah. So, as you can see, you can do a lot of great things when you're building out the project itself. On the right side, you can upload attachments. This information where you can do quick price sheets, you can import takeoffs, and then eventually you can do some linking with heavy job. Important part to note, there are some fields that are coming from desktop as we talked, because we made syncing, we made the desktop talk to pre construction, we made the syncing connection. Some of the fields are already marked with a green icon. This icon means that that information is talking to HeavyBid Desktop. You can also map that information in this area, heavy bid integration. As you can see, this section is where you choose what software is a source of truth. So, if you choose project tracking, and when you mouse over, you get a little bit of information, what it does. So, when you choose this option, then anything you make, any updates you make in project tracking will sync back to HeavyBid Desktop. This one is the opposite. Any changes you make in HeavyBid Desktop will sync into project tracking, and this will be the source of truth. And this is how I have set up here now. And if you scroll down, you can see that project name is synced to the estimate name and project name. Project number. So, what you're doing here, you're mapping. You're mapping those fields. And by mapping, as you just do a dropdown and then you see pre meeting date, that's something that I created. And maybe in HeavyBid Desktop, I have the same thing in there. So, you would just find that field in a dropdown and then you map it to it. So, this is how the mapping is done. And then that way it helps you working in projects. Any questions so far? I know I went, I covered a lot of information. Let me see. I don't see anything in the chat. Pull it up here. Perfect. Okay. So, talked about syncing. We talked about the project details, the items you can create, the values you can add. We also have contacts that you can add, contacts to set up. You can import those contacts, or you can manually add that information. You would add a company code, add a company name. I will not talk too much about this, but I kinda wanna click and show you what something that's already set up looks like. This is a contact information for Amazing Asphalt Construction Company. We have an office. We have scopes outlined, some notes. We have different people that are assigned to that company. Their phone information, that needs to be addressed, can add in here. You can add the notes. A good way to keep track of different companies, different vendors, and different people that work. And cool thing to remember in the company setup, you could pre do some of your work. Excuse me. You can preset the minority types in advance. So, when you're adding the company, can just pick and choose which item you want, the same with scopes of work. And it's pretty quick and easy. You click on add, you name it, and you can name it, and you are done. And you click save. And now I have a new scope of work. I also get this little notification telling me that no errors were seen, and little notifications always pop up over here to let you know if everything you've done has been saved. Now, back to projects. You can see a lot of information. You can create templates. You can see charts, as mentioned. You can see map. This map will give you information on all of the locations of your projects. Okay. They're pretty cool. But here's a very, very cool area, estimate insights. This is where you can see your data and compare it to other estimates. Just a little overview over this page. We have it set for all estimates. As you can see, if I click on the drop down, you can select archived estimates, which I don't have any, but if you do archive, they'll show up. You can click synced. But I always suggest just have it through the all estimates, because that is great when you are doing KPIs. Before I go into KPIs, I wanted to mention this map. This map has bubbles, circles that are in different size. Well, if you mouse over different circle, you can see different information and the size of the bubble depends on the size for the bid total. So, you can see this one big project was bid big amount. Oh, apologies. So we got one question that came in Real fast, talking about the standardized fields and project setup. Yeah. They're just asking, what is the function of that? Why are we standardizing those fields? Okay. So here is one of the fields, project names. We have it check marked as standardized. This is the latest release that we had released, the latest feature. What you do is you click standardized and you set what this project name is. Since this is a project name, what this field is, this is gonna be a name field. I can also set it up if I name this estimator and choose an estimator. So what this helps is for standardized data to talk between applications. So, when we're sending information to HeavyJob, they know that, okay, maybe you named this type one, but HeavyJob will know because you standardized it to be a name. So they will know, okay, type one is a name. Same with location. If you have a job site and then you click standardized field, location is the only location. So you can name it anything. You can name it map, job site, you know, pinpoint, but the heavy job or another product will know that this naming is for location. So, yeah. That will help in, you know, in a lot of reporting, transferring things, and all the cool things. So, I hope that answered. Yep, and Aaron also will reply in chats too. So, thank you, Aaron. Okay, back to projects. Oh, I don't want to do. So, once again, you see I get a message. If I made some changes, if I want to save them, I am discarding them. Going back to projects, estimate insights. That's where we dropped off. So, KPIs. Let me click on in estimate. When you click on the estimate, you can see information on it. Some information when it's last synced, when the review date is key dates, some of the totals. You can see the location on here. I can move up and down, zoom out. And key indicators are on the left side. So, some cool dashboards are on the left side. Key indicators. As of now, I came in and it shows me just a little information. Well, I want to compare this estimate to all of my estimates. So, now I have more information. Now, the system is comparing my project twenty five man-sixty two to all of the other projects and other of the estimates that I have linked in these projects. I can see some oranges. Orange usually is a warning sign. And if I open up different sections, I can see the ranges and I see where my percentages, where I fall, orange zero, and it looks like man hours were different numbers. So, maybe I should go address this. Same with, labor. I'm surprised that these are all zeros in here today. But I can go through each of them. Let me see if I can pick a different project. Let me see a demo estimate. KPI. No? Okay. Now I see some other information. I see some reds, some greens. Perfect. So, you can see a little bit better. You can see my current values in green. My normal range is this range. So, I am within the range. Looks pretty good. What about markup? Okay. It's in orange. So, I know I am a little bit above than my normal So, pretty cool, something that you can look through all the possible, all the sections, equipment, labor, and take a look and see on all the KPIs. Another area that is materials. Materials report can give you information on bottom line. So, you can choose, let me see, cost per unit, You can choose total material cost, and it shows the highest impact, the company's bottom line. So, that's, you know, a good place where you can take a look and see where you can save money. The top section will show this information, but you can also click on the dropdown and get a little bit more in-depth information. You can collapse all, back to expand all, little buttons, little features that help you view this information pretty quickly. Okay. Back to the estimate insights. Does anyone have any questions about KPIs, materials? Okay. Don't see anything. So, codebooks. Codebook dashboards. That is a very useful dashboard. It has three different reports. It has unused report, and you can see a little mouse over that kinda shows you what it does. It it shows that codes that have not been used in an estimate. You can see missing codes reports, and those are activity codes that are used in the estimate but do not exist in your activity code book. And then you can find the multiple, know, you might find the information that needed to be added into your code books and utilized. This is the information that is shown that is being used. You can see different items, like what level, how many times it's used, modified. And the date range, it is by default set to six months, but you can set different date range to utilize these three reports. Okay. Let's see, I see a question come in. Erika, we had one come in. Looks like Aaron answered it manually, but the question was just for everyone listening is, is there a way to set up filtered templates for KPIs? So, for example, one template for DOT for a region of the state for last year versus another one used for private work. And so Aaron did mention that not within the KPIs, but that is something that's a good idea that we could look into for the future. The only filter that we have now is the filter over here. As I mentioned, you can choose state, owner, type of work, and you can select a little bit additional information that you can filter your KPIs. And so hopefully that helps a little bit too with what we offer currently. And once again, it's over here at the top. It's under estimates. You go estimate insights. You click estimate insights. You click on the, estimate you want, and then you click key indicators. And then at the top, I already have these filters set up, but it would be a button that says, here it is, I'll remove it, and then you would just add filters. So, you can add different filters, and that will help you filter and see that information. Okay. No other question. Okay. These so, we showed the projects. We showed you how we are syncing desktop. Sometimes you will sync some new projects, and you might have I mean, not projects. You sync. The syncing happen of estimates. And some of these estimates are not linked to any of the projects that you have created. So I have a little icon telling me my six estimates are not linked to any of the projects. So let's say I have project on the right side that I created. I just created some basic ones. I click on one of the estimate, and then I choose the project that I want to link it to. And I click link. And now, in this project, I have two linked estimates. You can also link from an estimate itself. I'll remove the map. So, if I go to a project, I scroll down, and I scroll down, I have one linked, but I can also add another one by clicking add button, and then I choose the estimate I want to link to. But we also have linking available to the data, and that's our new HeavyBid. And this linking is similar. You click a button, takes you to HeavyBid, and you choose what project you want to link to. So, once again, I have so many different projects. I'm created my first project. I linked to it. I every we have defaults set up. I create. And now I built it out with my pay items and all the linking. So this is the other way of linking our new project, the estimates within new HeavyBid. So, we have HeavyBid Desktop area here and the A Beta. Does anyone have any questions on linking? Let's see. No new questions have come through. Good to go. Okay. I covered all these areas that are important for you to start to start the project tracking, project estimating. It's really great for your BDs knowing where the project statuses are. It's great for admins, project admins to keep track of different projects, create fields that help them, and of course, your estimators when it comes to estimating, again, pulling dashboards, different reportings that we have available, different contacts that you set up. And then also we have a lot of training available too. You can, see a lot of videos on the academy. We also have these webinars. And then another cool feature that you can see, sorry, if I go back to my beta, you can see, well, actually I can show you that from here too. Under the question mark, we have in app guidance on different training materials that you can click and videos will pop up to show you how you can do various things within precon, and maybe answer your questions that you have right there, right now. So, that is all for my presentation. Melissa, you back the controls, and let's see if there is any questions, if I missed anything. Thank you, Aaron, for helping answering those. We did get a question. Does HCSS Co-Pilot work for precon related topics? Does that work for pre con related topics yet? So, co pilot should pull, but I don't know how many topics. So, will check that out to exactly get the numbers and be more in-depth on my answer. So Jason, I can get back to you on that. Awesome. Are there any more questions from what Erika just showed today? Okay, I don't see anything, but we're happy to go back if any questions come up. So we're going to talk a little bit about common questions and pitfalls that kind of comes up when desktop users start to try to connect to preconstruction. So if sometimes if what if what if the sync isn't working, if that happens, there might have just been a little step maybe you missed and so, you can easily fix it. You can call support, right? We're they're available twenty four seven, seven days a week. So, you can call them at this number here. If you don't have them on speed dial already and then also what's the difference between free and paid version of preconstruction? We're going to put that also in the recap Email that we'll send you later today where it shows you the key differences if you want to upgrade to the paid version. So what do you do next after this? We've had three webinars which we're trying to you know show help you guys showing you how to easily sync the two. So, today, you can turn on. If you turn on that estimate history and heavy bid, that's the first step you can take. Connect your preconstruction module. We do have in the academy videos that will show you how to do that but again if you want to just call support have them walk you through it there's that route too you can take and then just once you have everything connected and ready to go just start with the very basics. We just suggest just getting familiar with it. Just enter those projects into your pipeline. Just put those initial project details in there and then they'll kind of get you used to that new workflow and then tracking every project from perspective to you're going to bid on it to you are bidding on it and so on. And then use the dashboard. That would be a great second thing to do once you get familiar with the project details like start using that dashboard to guide better decision making. So Erika showed you all the different tools we have within estimate insights and once you sync all that data up to heavy bid preconstruction you'll really start to see the advantages of using that. And so again we have lots of videos in the academy that will teach you pre construction and we have here's the support number and email if you want to call them to get things started. And that's pretty much it. Well, you know, you're already doing the hard work. We we always say. So, let all that data you have and let the system start to do more for you by connecting it to HeavyBid Preconstruction. And then here is Erika's contact info. If you have any questions at all, Aaron's contact info as well and yeah, if you guys have any questions, let us know. And we do have one. Any chance for expansion of certain fields in heavy bid? Meaning the character limit. Jason did you have anything specific in mind? I might regret saying this, but how many characters are you looking for? He's laughing. Enough to match heavy job. Jason, I can promise I will look into it. Awesome. Thank you, Aaron. Any other requests? All right. Well, thank you guys. Of course, if any questions pop in your mind after we end this webinar, just shoot us an email. Happy as always to answer any questions. And we will of course send you a recap of this recording as well as there is a downloadable in the Zoom. You'll see a little resources box. You can click in that downloadable. It's just going to recap everything you learned today. So, and we'll put that in the email as well though. All right everyone, thank you for attending. Real quick so it doesn't get missed. We did have one last second question come in and that was can we get on the fly added to the company field? Okay, let me share. Kevin, correct us if we're wrong. I'm assuming you're talking about the company flag in project detail, correct? Let me see if that popping out. If anyone wants to stay. Okay. So, I am assuming too on the contacts. Okay. So, add company. We just wanna see how a company process to add a company. Yeah, to exit out project entry and to contacts to add a new company. Correct, correct. That's true. If you in projects have a project and one of your fields is to choose a company point of contact. You can see different people or or you can even have a field for company. You do have to go save it, save a project you're working, and then add a contact in here. We don't really have that, as you called, on the fly within the project. So you would add this information on this field. You would save and then go back into your project and continue working. As you can see, you do you can have multiple windows open. So if I have a project I'm working, I don't have that company in here, I can have the same tab with projects, just open the contacts, and you quickly add that information in here. Yeah. Adding on the fly. Yep. That is something we we've been looking into. So hopefully next presentation, can show you add on the fly. But remember this this project, the tabs is pretty useful. Awesome. Okay, Kevin, if there's anything else or anyone else have a question. Awesome. Okay. Thank you. Well, everyone. Take care. Alright. Have a good one.