DOT Projects: Master Your Bid Imports & Submissions

Okay, I think we can get started. Well, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining once again, our monthly heavy bid customer webinar. We're excited to start doing some educational webinars for our customers. That's gonna focus on some specific workflows you've told us that matter most to you. So the ones that basically keep our support lines busy and your teams working hard. So this is one key thing that we've highlighted that I know you guys kinda, we get a lot of requests and help with this and it's DOT projects. So mastering your bid imports and submissions. But before we jump into things, we will kick it off with some introductions. My name is Melissa Teague and I'm the product marketing manager for HeavyBid here at HCSS. And so as a product marketer, I spend a lot of my time working with the sales team here at HCSS and our customers, and carefully just listen to your feedback on what additional resources you need to succeed. So whether it's a webinar around specific feature or workflow, you need help mastering such as this today, or creating some helpful handouts or blog posts. That's a lot of what I do over here. And I'll kick it over to Aaron. Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Aaron Allshouse. I'm the technical product manager for HeavyBid. My job is basically to to listen to your feedback and try and make the product as good as possible. As Melissa mentioned a minute ago, this webinar is definitely something that a lot of customers ask for. We've done this webinar in the past. We're going do it again just because it's great to rehash really valuable content. This is, by and large, our bread and butter is estimates. And in this case, we're going to walk through some of the tools that you have available in order to make this process as efficient and as painless as possible, allowing you to spend more time fine tuning your bid versus just simply having to recreate it, as well as some of the the troubleshooting steps that might come along if needed. Well said. Thank you, Aaron. And so before we kind of kick things off, Aaron kind of went over what we're gonna talk about today, showing you the five steps to master those DOT bids. He's gonna do a live demo so you can see the steps, talk about some resources available to you if you wanna dive in even more and then a Q and A. Before we do the demo, I wanted to, we have a ask for all of you guys. HCSS needs your help. We're trying to build a relationship with AASHTO through their partnership alliance. And so why do we wanna do that? We're trying to basically stop this importing and exporting of your DOT data. So we want a direct integration with AASHTOWARE and we can't build those relationships until we have a introduction. So they require us to be introduced through a contractor. So if any of you guys have a contact at your state DOT and would like to introduce us to them, we would greatly appreciate it. And if you scan this QR code here, it's just simply asking a quick what's your name, email, and what state. And then we'll reach out to you after that. But again, this is to help you guys eliminate this import and exporting and just integrate with them. Anything you want to add to that, Aaron? No. That that was great. Again, the the goal is to reduce the number of steps that you're about to see in this webinar to make this process even easier for you. Awesome. And I'll drop the link to this as well if you don't have your phones available in the chat. So any help, if you can give us an introduction, we'd greatly appreciate that. All right, so mastering DOT imports and submissions, there's gonna be five key steps that Aaron's gonna go through. And one of them is the DOT, so importing your files into HeavyBid. We're gonna be, he's gonna be using AsterWare just for the sake of demoing but you can use any DOT entity that you use and follow these same steps. Also, we're gonna go over the different options to populate the data. Then talk about DOT import addendums into HeavyBid. And then of course that last key step of exporting from HeavyBid back to the DOT. And then Aaron's gonna show you some troubleshooting steps as well. Alright. So we're gonna kick it off with a demo. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna steal the screen here. And we're gonna jump right into Ashtore. And can everybody see my Ashtore screen? Yes, I can see it. Perfect. Alright. So as Melissa pointed out, we're using Astraware as our as our sample submission tool today. However, this same flow, the same logic that we're going to discuss today will work with any number of entities. So that doesn't doesn't matter whether you're using ICX, BidExpress, Whitley Siddons, Pendot, or any one of the other hosts of DOT entities. This same process will work for you. As far as AsterWare is concerned, we're simply using that because this is the the letting that we're using as an example. It is an AsterWare style letting file. One of the key things that you wanna make sure that you are doing when you are in the letting system is making sure that the file type coming out of that letting system is the correct type. In Azure, that's as simple as going down to tools and options, and you'll see item list format here. And this tells you exactly what format the file is gonna be exported in, whether that is a COL or a CSV file. Again, depending on your your accounting system or I'm sorry, your your bid letting system, that can change. Right below that, this is the data that's going to be exported out of that letting system. So you have your line number, alternate code, item number, quantity, unit, unit price, description. All that information is coming straight out of your bid letting and coming right back into into HeavyBid. So outside of looking at options, we're going to dump this file out. So we're just going go and we're going to export the proposal. Again, we're just asking where do we want to send it. In this case, we're I'm going to throw it right in my downloads folder, and I'm sending it out as a COL file. Get a nice little confirmation. Export successful. And at this point, we're done in Astowork for a while. So we're gonna jump back in HeavyBid. So one of the key things we wanna look at are what are the options that we can do in HeavyBid prior to actually importing the data. You see here, I have a blank estimate. I don't have any bid items in here. These settings that we're gonna go take a look at, if you wanna make these changes and you want them to be perpetual, meaning they come in with every single estimate, you wanna make sure you make these changes in your master estimate. So to make those changes or look at what those changes are, we're simply going to go up to Tools, we're going to go to Preferences and Estimate. Under Estimate Preferences, we're going to find the item for DOT Import. This is gonna tell us everything that we can do in a particular DOT import and all the changes that we can potentially make. So the first item that we're going to address is the DOT file format. You can change this after the fact. This is just going to become your default. In this case, I'm using AsterWare for California. However, we have a laundry list of all of the other DOT entities that we have built in integrations for. We can use any one of them. The next item, again, is just a default. What is our bid item code book group? What that means is when we build our activities off of this import, what state group code are we gonna use to reference those item codes? We have to do this simply because, you know, there's fifty states and a lot of local municipalities as well as private owners. The chances of having a client number in the bid item code book match between different entities is extremely high, so we wanna make sure we're pulling the right data for you. And, you can change this, especially for those users who work in multiple states. This is just your default. Next items we're taking a look at is how are we actually numbering our bid? What is our bid item number gonna actually look like? By default, we're gonna start with a standard bid item ten numbering pattern and increment by ten. So ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. You can change this to one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, it doesn't matter. The only thing that I would suggest is don't do it, start at one and increment by one, simply because if the DOT issues you an addendum between two and three, and you have an option check that we are going to address here shortly, you can run into a roadblock because HeavyBid doesn't do decimals for the for the bid item number. You need to have whole whole digits. So just a word of caution there. Next time we want to take a look at is how we are ordering addendums. With an addendum, you get a change order, you get a different item added, you get quantity updates, whatever the case is, how do we want to address those? Do we want to ignore the bid item description changes? The bid item description does not necessarily play a role in whether the import and export is successful or not. So we can choose to ignore those. If your users get used to looking at one description, if the DOT changes it, you don't necessarily want to confuse them. It just gives you that option. And then this is where I was talking about with starting at one, incrementing by one. If you have this option, do not renumber existing bid items. If the DOT entered a new bid item in between one and two, there's nowhere for it to go. So you're gonna run into a roadblock. So you wanna be careful on how you set that up. Alright? Outside of addendum options, how we are creating the bid item code book codes I'm sorry, not the code book codes, but how we're creating the codes for the estimate. Next one we want to talk about is the bid item description. Every state's a little bit different. Some of some of the states, the description is limited to forty characters. Some of them are longer. How do you want to handle that? Some customers have gone in and brought those items into their bid item code book, and we wanna use those instead. So we give you different options. Pulling from bid item code book is gonna look at the DOT client number in the bid, and it's gonna reference it across your your bid item code book. It's gonna find the match, and it's gonna use that description instead of the one that's in the letting file. Bring up item to be abbreviated. I wanna, you know, cherry pick what my description is. We'll bring up a description for you every single time for you to edit. Now if you're working on a large bid, this can add a significant amount of time to simply just getting started. And then we come to the default, which is truncate to fifty characters. So if you have a letting that has more than fifty characters, we automatically truncate to fifty characters. Again, it does not hurt the submission status of your estimate. Now the next phase we want to talk about is what can we also bring in outside of our activity? So one of the options we have when we're building an estimate from the DOT is we can bring in your code book information. So we reference the bid item code book, and we bring in information from the bid item code book. This is just asking what all information do we want to bring in? One of the options in the bid item code book is an average price column. Do I want to use that as my bid item price right out of the gate? So without even building activities, I have based on some average, usually the state historical average, an average price, we're taking that average price, multiplying it by the bid quantity in the letting file, and now you have your your green sheet total. You have what your rough estimate total is going to be. Do I want to freeze the bid item price if the average price is used? Basically, do I want to bring in that average price, then freeze it, and now I can work up my bid without worrying about adjusting my average price or my historical average price? That gives me a really good tool to be able to compare my actual estimated costs against my historical averages because I can look at my balance price versus my entered price and see the difference, allowing me to make another informed decision. If you have summary groups set up in your bid item code book, we can bring those in. And then the one item that I suggest you never uncheck is pull activities and resources from the code book. If you have this unchecked, the associated activities and resources or library data will not come in. And then last but not least, in ninety nine point nine percent of cases, my suggestion to you is to never touch these two options. This is for very specific use cases, in which case the state client number has characters that aren't actually referenced in their actual state item codes. In that case, we can tell Heavy Bid to ignore the first two characters or whatever the case is in order to populate the estimate with the right dataset. Alright. With those preferences reviewed, we're simply gonna jump into the estimate now. How do we bring that information into the Estimate? Well, under the Exchange menu, we're going to go to Import DOTs. Now, you can go via the Exchange menu, or if you prefer, you can do that same thing under Setup Bid Items. So under Setup Bid Items, I can go to Import Bid Items, and I can do DOT Import, and it's going to bring up that exact same screen. Both of them will give you the exact same functionality, so it's just purse it's just personal preference on which path you want to take. So for our example, I have a couple COL files here. I'm gonna choose my base bid. This is my original export that we exported out of Ashtore. Ignore the name. This is just for demonstration purposes. But the first thing we're going to do is we're going to reference that DOT file. Remember we set it as EBS CA two in our preferences, so it automatically preloaded with that. If I want to change it, I can change it. Why are there so many different templates? Well, every state's a little bit different. Whether they use four characters for their item code, whether they use one or two characters, whether they have preceding zeros. The way that we handle frozen items or fixed price items, all of that is different on a state by state basis. So making sure that you choose the right entity is critical to make sure that the data is imported properly, as well as just as critical, exported properly. Aaron, we did have one quick question that just came in. They're wondering, any idea when this might be up and running on the web based heavy bid? So we do not have that on the road map for this calendar year to have the DOT integration functionality. That is one of the things that we definitely want to do the direct integration with, and we will be targeting that next year for development. Thank you. So once we select our file, once we select our DOT entity, if I wanted to have a quick access to those estimate preferences, I can click settings, and it's going to bring it right up for me. Otherwise, I can click Import DOT Items and you'll see my estimate automatically populates. It's going to bring in my description, my quantity, my unit, and my client number. That client number is what we are using to match up into the bid item code book to bring in any associated activities, resources, crews, and productions. There's a question that came in here. Does the average price from DOT get updated by HCSS, or does the end user have to do this? The end user has to do this. We do not have live integration with the DOT to bring in those averages. In most cases, the DOT will give you those averages in an Excel format or a PDF, in which case you can convert to Excel, and then we can import that into your bid item code book. But we do not have direct integration tied to it. Now, once those bid items are created, we can take the next step. We can build those activities using the code book. Again, we can choose what our state entity is. We're going to default to California and we are going to click the hammer button that's going to build our items. And you'll see here thirty seven activities were created with a total cost of seven million dollars If I jump back into my tree view, you can see that now I have activities under each of my items. We got to that we got to that by simply going to the bid item code book and seeing those activities tied to a particular client number. We matched up that client number and brought in the activity. That activity code is in our activity code book, and it's gonna bring in whatever data is associated with that activity in the code book. Excuse me. So let's see. So the next question that came in, if you use library estimates in your code book, what is the best workflow to update your library estimate with current rates and setups from your master and activity material code books? Can you also do this for non DOT estimates? So I see two parts in that question. The first question is, how do I update a library estimate? How do I update my rates? So one of the one of the big questions we might have is if I go to set up labor, for instance, how can I update my rates? So let's see. If I have updated rates, I can update my entire estimate with current info. If I change or let me take a step back, I can update my entire estimate with current info, but if I need to update my rates out of a different master, I'm simply going to go to Edit and Copy Merge Setups. That's going to allow me to take the information in this estimate and I get to choose what setup files I want to update. My labor, my equipment, whatever the case is. And then I'm going to choose what estimate I want to bring that information in from. I'm gonna pick a master estimate, and then I'm gonna tell HeavyBid what I wanna do with those duplicates. Do I wanna skip the duplicates? Do I wanna overwrite the duplicates? That's going to allow me to bring in those updated rates. As far as updated information from the code book, so we're thinking activity code book, we're thinking crews and productions that might change in my activity code book versus what's in my estimate. A library estimate is nothing more than another estimate that we have in the system, in which case we don't have a tool that's built in to retroactively update your bid with items from the code book. We still want to treat that the same as if it was a working bid. We don't want items being retroactively updated. Now, can you also do this for non DOT estimates? You absolutely can. So one of the or one of the questions that comes up a lot is I don't use the bid item code book because I don't do DOT work. Well, the bid item code book, while it was designed for DOT work, a lot of prime contractors who do a lot of sub work or a lot of the larger companies, they might have their own item list. You can import this information right into you can import that item list directly into your bid item code book if you do if you do a lot of repeat work for them. Alright. I see two additional items here. The library estimate needs to be updated along with the activity code book because it's the only way to house bid items with more than five activities. Jason, I understand that one, buddy. And that is part of the reason why users use the library estimate in lieu of adding activities. That's why we have the library bid item right here. What that does is it makes a connection to a library estimate, and that'll pull in whatever activities are associated with that library bid item instead of the activities that are tied directly into the bid item code book. And then can we update the report grouping at the same time? Can you elaborate on that at what point are you asking for that? So, Jason, I'm I'm seeing your questions here. I'm seeing your your updated response. Right now, the only TruFire solution to that is via the import export from Excel. We do not have a live tool to sync up between what's in the activity code book and what's in your live estimate. Alright, I'm gonna wait and see if we have an update on the report grouping, but in in the meantime, let's go ahead. Let's assume we need to import a change order. So if any amendments come in from the DOT, we load those up in our DOT entity the same way that we have always done. We're gonna go in, we're gonna load that amendment, we'll find the amendment files, and we'll bring those in. And then we are gonna export that information out into out to our desktop where we can make those changes. Now on the heavy bid side, we're simply gonna repeat the process. We're gonna go to exchange, import from DOT. Now in this case, ninety nine times out of one hundred, you're going to export that out to the original COL file. Because my sample bid does not have a really good amendment file on it, I went ahead and modified my own to basically demonstrate some of the changes that can take fate take place. So we're gonna bring in the modified change order, and I'm gonna import those. The first thing that you're gonna get is you're gonna get a notification saying direct bid items already exist. Importing from a DOT file will be considered an addendum. Do you wish to continue? In this case, we wanna click yes. And then what it's gonna do is it's gonna pop open a list of all of your items, and it's gonna show you what's different. Now in our example, I went ahead and I updated the quantity of an item. In this case, I updated it from fifty five to sixty, and I changed the description on that item. Anything that was changed, we're gonna highlight in yellow for you. What we're also gonna do is we're gonna show you what items are new and what items are no longer in the estimate. So if the DOT removes an item, we are not going to delete it for you. All we're going to do is we're going to make it a non additive bid item, and we're going to renumber it to the end of your proposal list. I believe we give it a number of, like, two billion or something some obscenely high bid item number so that it always shows up at the bottom of your bid list. But you can see here the old bid item and the new bid item number. In this case, this item is new. It did not exist, so we don't have an old bid item number. The item that we removed, the old bid item number was three hundred and twenty. The new one is two billion. Anything that's removed, we highlight in red. Anything that's new, we highlight in green. At this stage, we can hit commit changes. You'll get a nice little warning indicator saying this routine can take a few minutes depending on how big a change the DOT gives you. And then depending on what those changes are, HeavyBid's going to spit out an Excel file showing you those changes, but it's also going to bring up a window asking you what to do with quantity differences. So in this case, I had an old quantity of fifty five for that one item that we changed the quantity on. And HeavyBud's gonna ask, what do you wanna do with the takeoff quantity? Do I want that quantity to be bid quantity? Basically, to match my bid quantities, I'm gonna take whatever my new quantity is and make it match my takeoff. Do I wanna keep it the same? So keep it at fifty five. Do I want to apply a factor? Or do I want to make it a manual quantity? Do I want to just come in here and input a value? You get to choose what you want to do and we'll do that for each item that has an adjustment. In this case, I'm just going to set it to bid quantity. You'll see my takeoff quantity was automatically updated and I'm going to hit change quantities. Now, because I also brought in a new item, do I want to pull in from the bid item code book for that new bid item? I'm going to click yes. And in my case, one bid item was created, but I did not have any items tied to that item. So we didn't bring in any additional items. I can go and look at my bid, and I can see those changes take effect. I have my new mobilization item. I have my old mobilization item. I can also go up here to bid item twenty and see my descriptions updated as well as my quantity. Outside of this, you're going to continue to operate the same way that you always have. You're going to build your bid, bring in your activities, adjust your productions, everything you need to do. Set your markups, do your final pricing. Once you've done this, you're ready to export your bid back out to your DOT. To do that, we're going to go back to the exchange, but instead of going to import DOTs, we're going to go to export to DOTs. Now, in this case, we have estimate costs that have changed. I'm going to run summary because I never summarized the cost on this. In this case, I've got a little over seven million dollars in my bid, and I'm going to repeat my export to DOT. And it's going to ask us where do we want to send this data? So I can go over here and I can apply it to my base bid. And once you click okay, it's done. If we need to verify that information, I can look in the COL file and I can see that some of those items have prices. I can see that right here. Dollars two twenty three a unit, dollars thirty one thousand a unit, zero two nine a unit and so on. Finally, I can jump back into the DOT. And from in that DOT, we're simply going to import our item list. Again, this stage is a little bit different depending on what DOT entity you use, but the process is the same. I'm just simply going to find my file and import it. In this case, thirty one of thirty two items were successfully imported. We don't have thirty two out of thirty two because remember, I made that mobilization item non additive and added my own. So it was no longer part of the of the bid. So the DOT is smart enough to know that that item was not part of the original letting is not going to import it. But you'll also see here any items that had my unit price in there, all automatically came in as well. And our item total matches what we have in our bid pricing screen. Now, that's fine and dandy. We also get a lot of questions from customers saying, my prices did not come in. Why did my prices not come in? Well, there are a few items we wanna take a look at to make sure that we have all of that information covered, and that's all done in bid item setup. So under bid item setup, we want to go to our customize tab and we want to make sure that we have two columns specifically selected. We have the client number and we have the sequence number. That sequence number is what HeavyBid uses to match up this line item with your export file. What do I mean by that? This sequence number matches this item number. Now, you'll see here this item number has four or three leading zeros where I don't have any leading zero in my sequence number. That's part of why it's so critical to make sure that you're choosing the right entity. HeavyBid has it built into it to know that we need to insert those leading zeros on the export. The other question that comes up a lot is why are my sequence numbers not populated? Nine times out of ten, the sequence number isn't populated because the original import was usually done via Excel and not the DOT import. When I do an Excel import, we give you a lot of options. So if I go import from Excel and I look at my bid item list here, there are a whole lot of options on what I want to bring in. Sequence number is nestled somewhere right here in the middle. But if I don't have that filled out from my letting file, then we have no way to make that connection. Now, last but not least, if I jump back over here to Ashtore, there are cases where the unit price is not coming in correctly. What if I am missing a character? A character gets cut off or in this case, I have eight thousand eight hundred dollars versus eighty eight thousand dollars for my unit price. Well that goes right back in to our file format. You'll see here we have different field sizes. For COL files, for text files, those field sizes indicate where that next column starts. And if the import wasn't done or export wasn't done correctly, those fields might not line up. So Heavy Bid might have that information in the export file, but it might not match up where the DOT entity is looking for that data. So it might actually cut off some information. We want to make sure that that information is being pulled in correctly. Basically, matching that up is as easy as coming in here, counting the total number of characters until you get to the point that you are looking for, in this case, unit price, and then jumping into the COL file and making sure that that first character matches that column number. So if it's the sum of everything up till unit price is fifty, I want to make sure that my unit price starts at column fifty. If it started at column forty nine, then the leading eight would have been cut off. No. Those are a couple of the troubleshooting tricks. But by and large, that is how you do the import and export from DOT. Building the estimate is the same as it's always been. You're going to build it from your code books, or you're going to go in and you're going to build it from scratch. However, taking that COL file directly from the DOT saves you the trouble of having to try and turn it into an Excel file and import it, or worse yet, trying to recreate that information from scratch and bid item setup one at a time. Exporting it out saves you the trouble of accidentally either adding an extra zero or forgetting an extra zero and inputting the incorrect unit price and now you're liable for that value. With that being said, I want to open the floor up to any questions. I also just dropped in the chat for all of you guys. There's an academy course out there that you can grab that link, save it for later. We'll also send this recording to you as well, but just letting you know there's some additional resources too here that can help you. And then we have a few questions come in, Aaron, which I think you you're reading right now. So, Jason, why isn't there a way to update an existing estimate with code book setups? Because by and large, our historical feedback from end users is we don't want our libraries updating our existing bids. And a library estimate, by definition in heavy bid, is still just a working estimate. So we don't want anything to retroactively come in and update our update our estimate with changes that we have in the library. And that's definitely something that we can look at in the future. But for right now, that's how how Heavybid operates. Next question. Sometimes my library does come over for an item. What are some of the reasons? Or sometimes my library doesn't come over for an item. What are some of the reasons why? So that's a great question. And David, correct me if I am mistaken here, but what you're saying is when I go over here to import DOT items and I come in and select build activities using that code book, or if I come over here to bid item setup and use the select bid items function, my items from the DOT or from my bid item code book don't necessarily come in. Well, nine times out of ten, it's usually because there is a spacing issue in my client number. What we do is we reference the the client number as it sits. If there is a leading space or there are spaces in between. I know TxDOT had or we had this issue with TxDOT several years ago where depending on the estimate, the way that their item numbers are arranged is it's three leading characters with a hyphen and then four trailing characters. In some lettings, they would actually input an extra zero for the first character or they put spaces between the first segment and the second segment and the hyphen. Because we read the line literally and we saw those spaces or that extra zero, now they don't match. We want to make sure that those items match. For TxDOT, we built a utility that took care of that and we had that built right in to Heavy Bid for future estimates, so it's no longer a problem with TxDOT. But the issue is still the same. If the client number does not match what is in the code book because of a leading zero or an extra space somewhere where it shouldn't be, that's more often than not the reason why your activities don't come in from the code book. Are there any other questions anyone has? Alright, I'm not seeing anything come in. Aaron, if you're okay, do you mind if I steal back the screen? Yeah, not at all. And Jason, I know we've got a meeting next week. We can continue that conversation then. All right. Thanks, Aaron. Okay. So I did drop a link in the chat for you guys that kind of goes over this that Aaron shared with you just now. So check it out. That's the academy. There's a lot more videos in addition to this, very quick one minute, sometimes fifteen minute videos that can help you. Also, you can call support anytime. Just a reminder, that's twenty fourseven. So you probably know the number by now, but it's there for you. Or you can reach out support@hcss.com. And here are our email addresses as well. We have Aaron's here, we have mine. If there's other helpful content that you guys want sort of like this, please reach out. I'd be happy to talk with you guys, see what you need. We love doing this sort of interactive educational webinars to help you guys. So any ideas, please send it my way. All right. I'm not seeing any more questions. Thank you all. Have a great rest of your week. And we'll see you soon. Have a good one everybody.