Estimating Monthly Webinar April 2025

Well, thanks everyone for joining us. We're really excited for today's webinar. You're going to get a behind the scenes look at how Rogers Group is transforming their estimating process and eliminating, you know, wasted time, cutting out manual entry, and connecting their tools into one seamless workflow. So we have one of their estimators here today, Robert, and he's going to share with you how using heavy bid and heavy bid together has really improved his estimating workflows from the moment a project comes in all the way to bid submission. So what you're gonna learn today is how to create a seamless estimating workflow from project planning to bid, real world tips from Rogers Group on saving time and just reducing those frustrations. You'll see how using heavy bid preconstruction and heavy bid together will increase efficiency and really just reduce a lot of those headaches. And, also, we have our technical product manager here, Aaron, who will demonstrate the best ways to use some of those key features we'll be talking about today. So without further ado, we'll kick it off with some introductions. So I'm Melissa Teague, and I'm the product marketing manager for our estimating products, so heavy bid and heavy bid preconstruction. And my job is to really just connect the dots between our products and the real world challenges that you guys face in heavy civil construction. So, basically, I work really closely with Aaron and Amanda in the product team just to shape our messaging and develop resources to help you get the most out of your software. And kick it over to Aaron. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Aaron Allshaus. I'm the technical product manager for HeavyBid. I've been with HCSS here for coming up, twelve years now. And if you've, been a customer for any length of time, you've either been on the phone with me or seen me in one of these webinars in the past. So happy to still be around. Awesome. Thank you. And I'll have Robert give his intro in a little bit. So we're gonna kick off this webinar just given for those of you that don't know, a lot about preconstruction, just a quick overview of what it is. So having been preconstruction is a web based tool for project tracking and estimate management. So it's also meant to be used simultaneously with heavy bid. And connecting heavy bid preconstruction and heavy bid, it's meant to streamline your entire estimating workflow. So bid management, cost estimating, analysis, and submissions, that can all be done in one seamless workflow. And if you didn't know, this tool is free for all HCSS customers. So after this webinar, if you like what you see, you can go ahead and turn it on right after. And we also have a visual here just it's a snapshot just to kinda show you what it can do when you use the two together, the key features. So you can see we have heavy bid You can do everything from project tracking to sync in your calendars, contact management. You can look at estimate insights. And then, of course, when you go over to heavy bid, you'll do your estimate setups, create the estimate, review the estimates, and submit those bids. So but we'll have Robert here himself kinda tell you his story, what his workflows look like before using HeavyBid preconstruction, to what it looked like after starting to use HeavyBid preconstruction with HeavyBid. And I'll kick it over to you, Robert. Alright. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks you, thanks for having me on. So quick background for me. So I grew up in the construction industry. I love this. I grew up at rural rural Maine doing kind of primarily, concrete foundation work for my dad's small business. And I got started in the heavy highway, heavy civil world about ten years ago, back in North Dakota. Recently, about a year ago, moved to South Carolina, started working for Rogers Group. And so I've been a heavy bid user for coming out about nine years now. And a little background about Rogers Group. So we're the largest privately owned aggregate producer in the US, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. We've got about eighty five quarries, fifty five asphalt plants, over three thousand employees. And I say about because those numbers are changing, pretty regularly, with bolting on, new operations in some of these states that we're working in. So core competencies, primarily asphalt paving, aggregate production, hot mix asphalt production, milling, reclamation, grading, and, you know, a long history, legacy here, at Rogers Group. So we were founded over a century ago in nineteen o eight, by Ralph Rogers, and the company continues to be, you know, managed, by a lot of the descendants of of Ralph Rogers himself. Alright. Free con. So disorganized project information. So prior to free con, you know, we would have, in on the estimating team, bid schedule saved in Excel workbook. You'd be having things saved on on various network drives. Maybe the bid schedule is being emailed out to the estimating team and maybe other stakeholders. You know, one of the difficult things with that is that it's especially if you're on the field or you're traveling, it can be very difficult to, manage and access that, where on the field. So that was kinda, you know, previous to precon, that was a big, big headache of mine. Tracking perspective jobs, you know, potential projects that you're looking at bidding, you're not really sure you're ready to commit to it. You know, typically, those kinda go into a log somewhere, bidding documents maybe in some folder on a shared drive. Again, prior to pre con, didn't really have a good CRM system. Contact information data could be found, Excel spreadsheets, emails scattered throughout your Outlook, online, maybe different third party CRMs, you know, bid results and backlog, things like that. You know, we're talking about another, add another one or two Excel workbooks there, and so on and so forth with competitor tracking and some of these other things. And and one of the major difficulties there was having to input the same information into two or three or four different Excel workbooks, and and in doing so, open up opportunities to, you know, having a typo, erroneous data, or even just inconsistent data across those, you know, two, three, or four different systems. So now going over to pre con, now whether a project is perspective, you know, or for sure opportunity, things get added in right away. You're able to put in, you know, various project details. For instance, you know, the estimator, customer locate customer location data, key dates, asphalt plant, and there's a whole pile of things you can add in there. One of the really cool things I like are bid schedules are live. So as you're say you have a template on here for a a bid schedule, anytime an adjustment is made, say maybe a bid date changes, a pre bid changes or is or is added, those adjustments take place, immediately. And, so folks who are looking to get, you know, the up to date information can can log on and and see that right away. Prospective jobs can be added to the schedule and even delineated from jobs that are currently being estimated. So, you know, hey. What's actually on the books? What's it for sure? And what's a a possible no go? Maybe something that that, you know, the estimating team needs to take a look at and and perhaps do some more digging on. Also, kinda going in with centralized system here, you know, we'll talk about it more later, but contacts being managed in contact management has been, such a such a huge win. You're able to even tie out within your project details the customers, you know, who you intend to quote with your contact management. So you're able to link those together, and that's that's huge. Again, going back to, like, the the live information piece too, bid results and competitor tracking. If you have those templates set up correctly, you're able to get, again, live information. So as soon as that data is input in the project detail screens, you're able to get that information right away and make those kind of those game day decisions, with the most up to date information. And, again, the the people lesson here, you're putting the information into one location. You know, you set up an SOP, and, everybody knows what information to put and where, and you're not having to, put information in this Excel workbook for this case and this one for that and then gather from another spot for this other information, this other critical piece for your bid. That's all in one spot. So quick, pro tip. Yeah. Start syncing and archiving your estimates now. It's the there's enormous benefit there. You know, even if you're not the necessarily the decision maker, there's steps you can kinda start taking now to prepare for that. And once you do, kind of a little bonus pro tip here, try out that quick price sheet. That's a a relatively new feature in precon. I've used it several times. Really the big benefit there is especially if you're looking at a a project, if it's a potentially a go, no go, not sure, or you just wanna know, hey. What am I getting into? Is this a five million dollar job or a fifteen million dollar job? The quick price sheet tool is really helpful where it takes your previous your historical bid price information and cost information, and you can kinda set up a bunch of filters there to really develop a hey. Here's here's how you typically bid on these particular items and give you a rough idea on where this one's gonna land. Yes. The challenge of underutilized data. So, you know, so as I mentioned previously, we were tracking things all over the place in multiple Excel workbooks. So one of the one of the tricky parts is, KPI. So that's mentioned on here. So KPIs, if you're not familiar, stands for key performance indicators. So some of the the general metrics that maybe your firm uses to identify for project is profitable profitable enough for you, if it's a it's a particular scope that you, you know, do really well at and you sort of know, hey. You know, this sort of project generally gets about this many tons per man hour or or gross profit per ton or something like that. Previously, that was a little tricky where I have to go and sort of harvest this data, you know, doing maybe, going into logging into various different estimates, looking at all kinds of different workbooks to try to get this. So and, honestly, because of that, I had to rely mostly on anecdotal evidence and gut instincts to sort of say, hey. Yeah. This one this one plays. This this makes sense for us to go after or to price out this way. And that works. It's just not optimum. So now the solution estimate insights. So I love this tool. So now if you are using this, or or when you access Precon here, you'll have this screen where where you can set up there there's a comes out of the can where there's a bunch of different KPIs all ready to go. And, basically, it it'll go and show you this estimate compared to all your other estimates. So as long as those estimates are synced, and you can even delineate between archived estimates and sync estimates. And Aaron can probably give a a better definition of what that all means. But all the information is now housed here, and you can see in one central location all the data that you were chasing down before in previous estimates and workbooks, it's all in one spot. So quick pro tip. Yes. Set up your team's custom KPIs and heavy bid, and then push them out to precon. So, again, if there are particular, metrics that you wanna see, here on this screen, You can set that up, set those up, as in heavy bid. I think maybe Aaron will do a demonstration on that. And that's relatively easy to do. And you can set that up to where those come in every single time to where you know the people who are reviewing your bids, they wanna see these three KPIs. Maybe they don't necessarily care about all the others, but you have these three ready to go every single time for them. And so I definitely encourage get those set up, get them set up and have you bid and push them out. Another really cool feature here is the ability to exclude estimates. So if you have estimates, I'm sure you do where there's maybe change orders or or just bad estimates that maybe were, sandboxes where maybe you've used to as a as a little play around to mess around with different scenarios, and And you don't want that to influence the data or corrupt, your data pool. You can manually go in and exclude a bunch of those, especially if you folks who are involved in material production. If you wanna get rid of your maybe your mix estimates or your aggregate producing estimates, you can get rid of all that so you have a true, or a, a clearer picture of, what you're trying to view here. And then also kinda third bonus tip here, create some filters so you can drill down. Say you want to you consistently look at your particular DOT. You just wanna look at jobs where if you have, set that up on your project detail screen where, you know, you're you're quoting the South Carolina DOT, for instance. Hey. I just wanna look at projects that are we go to the South Carolina DOT within this bid value range and maybe over the last two years, and you can just show those particular projects. Very, very helpful. You can drill down as as deep as you wanna go here. Alright. And with that, I'm gonna steal the screen here, so bear with me just a moment. And everybody should be able to see my, pre con screen. I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper in about. Estimate insights is a great tool that essentially allows you compare your estimate data across your other estimate, across your other estimates. Now when you are in precon and you take a look Erin, I think, your screen isn't sharing. See. I'm sorry about that. Zoom just quit on me unexpectedly. So bear with me a moment here. I'm gonna reassure you. Some some Zoom, technical difficulties. Can can y'all hear me? I can hear you. Yes. Mhmm. Okay. Perfect. Let's try this again. There we go. Alright. So, forgive me. I don't know what everybody heard or what what everybody didn't hear. So as Rob as Robert mentioned, estimate insights is a great tool because it allows you to essentially run analysis on an estimate, as well as compare it across, similarly scoped estimates. You can do that via a number of ways. First one that we want to take a look at is the exclusion. As Robert mentioned, there are a lot of instances where you might have estimates that you don't want to run, comparisons against, when you're when you're looking at analysis data. Whether that's change orders, addendums, if you're looking at data for a different DOT, and something to that nature. You want to be able to exclude those bids from any kind of analysis. So within your main estimate list, and as Robert mentioned, you can also filter this list to synced and archived estimates. I'm just taking a look at everything here. But there is a column here called excluded estimate. What this does is it's going to permanently exclude whatever estimate you have selected from your analysis. If you don't have this option, on your estimate list, you can access it by going to the three dot button in the far right of your screen, going to show hide columns, and my show hide columns will eventually pull up here. Okay. I am not this worked five minutes ago. I'm not sure why it's not showing up right now. But, essentially, you'll get a column chooser here. And in that column chooser, there'll be a, a checkbox for excluded estimates. Now diving into any kind of estimate, you just all you need to do is jump into the estimate. You click the link. It's gonna take you into your estimate details. This is a lot going to allow you to go into your key indicator section. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna show you your, KPIs on any given estimate, and you can, dig into any of that data. And any of these KPIs, what they do is they're gonna show you the percentage for this particular estimate, but it's also going to show you how it relates to your other estimates that are part of your analysis. You can see which estimates are part of your analysis by simply looking up here at the list of estimates that are included in that. And as Robert mentioned, if you wanna get more granular in your results, simply make use of the filters, and you get a laundry list of options that you can filter your data based on. Now, one other thing Robert mentioned is every customer has a certain metric or a certain indicator that they use to judge the performance of a bid. As much as we would love to say that we account for every single possible scenario, we don't. But in HeavyBid Desktop, we give you the ability to build your own custom key indicators. So if we take a look at HeavyBid and under the bid summary screen, so by going to summary and then summary, at the bottom right of bid summary under the totals tab, you have a key indicators button. Within that key indicators button, I can go over to setup and I can build any kind of, custom key indicator that I want. In this case, I've created a custom key indicator called total equipment liability, and I can save that to view across all of my estimates. But I can do one one step further, and I can actually send those custom key indicators to insights. It's as simple as clicking a button and saying, sending key in key indicators to estimate history will overwrite any existing key indicators. So, basically, if I have any that are already up there, we're gonna overwrite with whatever the most recent copy is from desktop. So I'm gonna click yes to, do that. Key indicator export complete. It's that simple. I've sent my key custom key indicators from HeavyBid Desktop up to insights. Now jumping back over to insights, to view my custom data, I can go up to show hide KPIs, and within about a minute, I will see all of my custom key indicators. But for right now, I've got the previous four here. If I go ahead and refresh my screen here, let's see how quickly it came up on my my machine here. If I go to show high KPIs, it's already up there. So my, total equipment liability is already added. I click the checkbox, and now I have a custom column here where I can see my total equipment liability. So now I get the opportunity to see my own custom performance indicators, and I can compare that against any one of my other, any one of my other estimates that fit my filter criteria. This is a great tool because it allows you in a very simple manner to gauge the performance of your bid and especially compare it to other past projects of similar scope that you have potentially won in the past. So you can get a feel for how this bid relates to those past projects. Alright. And with that, I'm going to turn it right back over. Alright. Next, let's talk about calendars. So especially in relation to, bid dates while away from the office, it can be a headache, when you're traveling or say that your network is down, don't have access to your email. It's difficult to unless you have a printed off copy, it's difficult to have some of those critical bid date information, when you're on the go. So previously, I used to have, pre bid meetings, bid dates, bid reviews all tracked in Excel, would go and manually create calendar invites and have everything fairly organized guy. I'd have everything set up on, Outlook and kinda tied up to what I knew that the, specific project needs were. But like I said, I really wasn't able to access a lot of that stuff while in the field. Or if there was a change, like we mentioned before, there was an addendum that came out, or for whatever reason, maybe a a bid date or a pre bid change or maybe the bid review date and time change because somebody had a scheduling conflict. I wasn't able to make those adjustments in one spot and push that elsewhere. So the previous way it worked, it just wasn't optimum. Kinda got me by. And, but there are certainly better ways to do it, and it definitely felt like it. So now you have the ability to integrate your bid schedule, bid calendar, whatever you wanna call it, with your Outlook. So you would we you can let's see. On the screen there, there's a calendar to the right. You can set up a template. For me personally, I set up a bid schedule, but just showing the bids that I have due. And, you'll pull open and make sure that you click on that, calendar piece over there, and you can integrate this calendar with whatever information that you wanna have on there. For me personally, I use the I'll have on there, like, the pre bid, my bid review, and the bid date. And as long as I'm keeping up to date, all that information in the product detail screen, all that stuff now gets pushed over into my Outlook automatically. And so whether I'm traveling, I'm out of the field, or somebody has a quick call, you know, wants to know when something's going out, when something's due, or wants to just verify, you know, our time for the bid review. I have all that information accessible on my phone, you know, on Outlook, on Microsoft Teams, whatever. So, again, just the ability to be able to access that any single time that I want wherever I am. Yeah. So approach it. I mean, use this thing. So you again, with the bid schedule, it's not just for the bid date. You know, put your pre bid meetings and your bid review times in there, so you can integrate that fully into your Outlook calendar, and you're not gonna miss anything. Yes. Another challenge, disc disconnected contact management. So I'm not sure if any of you have had this experience, but oftentimes, getting contacts for subcontractors, suppliers, oftentimes, it's, hey. You know, there's this one guy. I know he works for this. You know, he's let's see. Maybe my superintendent, he has this contact for this guy here. I know that I've got a email somewhere from this other striping guy, that we used for this last project, and things are sort of scattered everywhere or maybe use a a good CRM system, and there's plenty out there. But there was never kind of one source where you could sort of house all this stuff. And, you know, now HeavyBid has one. HSS has one that also integrates with HeavyBid. So now the contact management system. This is great. So we just recently pushed everything over here, I think, last summer. So we were previously here at Rogers using, the contact management system within Heavybit itself. Precon recently added this feature, you know, encrypt me if I'm wrong, I think last summer, and, made it really easy to do. So if you already have something going on in HeavyBid and you have the kinda your vendor database or whatever it is called in there, that work wasn't all for not. You can actually push all that information over here without having to do any sort of Excel spreadsheet, you know, mapping, anything like that. I know when I did it here, I think I I started the process. I went out to lunch. I came back, and it was all on here. So, again, this is one of those, perfect example of, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So certainly recommend getting as much information in here as you can, adding things like scopes of work, assigning who the main contact is, different accounting codes. If you need to set things up, for your, you know, for a a handoff meeting for, say, the accounting folks, You might have a particular normal picture or coding they wanna see. You can get all that set up here. One of the benefits that I've really reaped here is again, this connects back to heavy bid now. So when you're soliciting for subcontractors, setting them up in your quote system, you can kinda drill down in in your quote folders and say, hey. I'm looking for you know, just show me all of my striping subcontractors. And, again, if you have the trade scope outlined, excuse me, all that detail in here, all your striping subcontractors will come in. If you wanna, you know, again, whittle it down even further to, just show me the the guys in this particular area, you can do that as well. So this has saved me a a bunch of time. Now, like I said, we have, you know, kind of to be transparent. I came into an area, didn't really know a whole lot of the different different players. And then to be able to sit down and jump into into an estimate and be able to know who to solicit for because most of this stuff was set up, made it much easier for me, like I said, rather than going around, you know, using a third party system, asking people for, you know, different emails with different contacts. Now we have one place that stores it all. And like I said, integrates with HeavyBid with your, subcontractor solicitation and your quote folders. One, you know, pro tip here. I mean, add as much information as you can here as far as trade scope details. And, you know, now there's a new feature too where you can, you can sort of report on, interactions. For instance, I I found out recently there's a particular subcontractor that we use with regularity that he's kind of a one man band, and he's getting ready to to hang it up soon. And kinda gave a rough, idea on when that deadline was gonna be. So I entered that information in there so that way we can be as we're kinda having monthly meetings talking about, you know, our estimating processes and things like that, that can be, you know, comes up as a as a subject, or or a talking point about, some of the different interactions we've had, and we can we can talk about those sorts of things. And it's super easy to maintain. You know, when you're estimating staff, you know, set it up to where everybody sort of has ownership over it. If you find out that there's another contact or maybe a preferred contact, new phone number, something like that, it's super simple to jump in there, edit some of those details, and save it. And, similar to Aaron's demonstration earlier, it was within, you know, within a minute or so. That information is accurate and up to date. Alright. I'm gonna steal the screen back here. We're gonna walk through contact management. Robert did a great job of, giving you the ins and outs of what it can do. And we're going to hopefully see this does not, crash on me again. Alright. Can everybody see my screen? Alright. Perfect. So contact management is an excellent tool that allows you to basically apply your entire vendor, vendor list. Your all of your contacts, all of your suppliers, all of your subs, everybody in one list. The cool bit about the company list here is now I have a web interface that I can manage everything from one from one location. I also have API integration here. So if I have a CRM, I can push my contacts from my CRM into this contact management system. As Robert mentioned, it's really simple just to jump into a contact. If I need to update, any any kind of information, I can just go into my edit. I can update my office address information. I can update my main, phone number, update web address information. The scopes of work, that is essentially how you can narrow down in the quote system the type of vendor this is. What type of work does this, vendor supplier sub what type of work do they actually do? Or what type of materials do they sell you? If you need to update any of the contacts, all I need to do is go in and edit, my contact. I can put in phone numbers, cell numbers, emails, whatever the case is. I can update names, anything I need to do. I can come in here and adjust that. As Robert mentioned, I can go in here, and I can also put interactions on that particular contact. If I got an email or I got a new updated list, I can, a new updated material price sheet from from that particular vendor. I can log that interaction, against that particular contact for that vendor. Now one thing Robert also mentioned was you can sync the contact management system with your heavy bid vendor database. How do you do that? And one of the questions that comes up when we talk about this is, well, I've had HeavyBid a lot longer than I've had precon. What if I've already spent the time and curated my system wide vendor contact list in HeavyBid, and I wanna use that, but send it up to contact management. We make that really simple. So in HeavyBid, under tools, preferences, and system, I can jump down to web applications, and I have a new option called contact management. Essentially, all you need to do is click this button that says enable. What we do is we run a check. We have several checks here, and we have several checks here because of various, various, criteria that we have to meet. Do you have, a credentials account? Do you have estimate history enabled? Are you, an enterprise account? We wanna take all of that into account so that your contact data doesn't get screwed up when it gets sent up. But to enable it, all you need to do is click the enable button. We run through the check automatically. You don't have to do anything until we get to the final step where in the event that vendors already exist And I'm wondering, I think we're seeing the preconstruction, yep, screen right now. Can't see the heavy bed one. Just top. Yeah. Nope. Okay. Alright. Let's try this one more time here then. So, basically, from within, my system preferences, I can click a button that says enable. That's going to allow me to basically funnel my system wide vendor contact list from HeavyBid up to, my pre con contact management system. If I have vendors already in contact management, HeavyBid's gonna ask me a question, and that is, do I want to overwrite the contacts in, contact management? And there's a few options. One is, yes. Give HeavyBid priority when, I find a duplicate. So if in the event I have duplicate vendor codes, which one am I treating as the source of truth? We can either have HeavyBid be the source of truth, we can have contact management be the source of truth, or we can just say, hey. I don't want to use anything that's in HeavyBid. I just want to use what's in contact management. Once we make that choice, we make a system backup of HeavyBid. That way, in the event that you ever need to revert back, you have that data that you can revert back. And, again, once everything's done, you get a nice little notification. As Robert mentioned, the more contacts you have, the longer this process is gonna take, but I'm not talking over the weekend. I'm talking, if you have ten thousand contacts, it'll take a few minutes. Run, grab some coffee, come back, it should be done. Now everything's enabled. If I wanna turn it off, I simply click disable. The big thing you're gonna notice in HeavyBid is under subsystems, I no longer have my vendor business contacts button. It's been replaced with a contact with a contact management button. When I click that, it's going to take me into my pre con contact management system where I can manage my vendors here. Anytime that I am updating anything in my estimate that requires my vendors, such as if I'm going into my quotes, I'm going into let's see. Do I have anything in this bid? I do not. But for the sake of demonstration, if I go well, let's let's add a material. Anytime I'm going in and I'm looking at vendors, this list right here is syncing with what's in contact management. Everything that I am trying to pull in is going to be syncing with what's in contact management up, in precon. It's no longer pulling from my from my system wide vendor business contacts that previously was in heavy bid. And we run that sync automatically in the background anytime that you do certain actions in heavy bid, such as go into quote summary, go into a quote sheet, we automatically run that sync in the background to make sure that whenever you're grabbing a vendor, you're grabbing updated, information. Any questions on that? Let's check. Nope. Just the questions on just the questions on I'm not seeing my screen here. We have one about who in an organization, would need a paid account versus a free free access. So it all depends on what level of detail that you are trying to, that you're trying to get access to in pre con. Unfortunately, I do not know all of the differences off the top of my head, so I can't answer answer that right away. But, we have a a nice little one pager that goes over all of the differences. But long story short, anyone that wants to do highly customized actions wants to join the, paid version. Anyone that is simply going in and looking at estimate data can probably get away with the free version of precon. Thanks, Aaron. And we will send in the follow-up email this recording, and I'll also attach the one pager so you can see, what's free versus paid. Right. There is a so there is another question that came up, and that is assuming everyone sees the company list, how do you suggest filtering the data so only one region sees their companies? That is a a slightly loaded question. One of the reason or one of the ways that a lot of customers do that is they're an enterprise customer, so they have multiple business units, in heavy bid. Your contact management system is treated the same way. That was part of one of the checks that we do. If you are an enterprise customer, we wanna make sure that your contacts are going to the appropriate business unit in precon so that, in this case, your California division does not see the contacts in your Virginia division, because your local material supplier in Sacramento is probably not gonna be ultra helpful to Reston, Virginia. That that is one way. The other the other way is, when we are in our contacts, we can come in here and we can basically, view information, if I had it in here based on, address information where where essentially we can, limit to who you see based on location. So so if we had scopes of work and we have that limited down or we had type limited down to location, we can actually come in here and we can filter that down to specific types of work. So if you had it, filtered down to a location, if you did not have an enterprise system, You could do that here. Can contact management be used on a bid to bid basis to manage responses? For example, bidding, not bidding, waiting on a response, etcetera. So in that instance, it's kind of a combination between, contact management as well as the vendor solicitation system in heavy bid. So contact management comes down into vendor solicitation and heavy bid. That's where you're managing your solicitations, your contacts, for a specific bid. Is this, vendor bidding? Are they not bidding? Am I getting quotes from that vendor? I can basically do all of that communication in my vendor solicitation module within HeavyBid, but I can use my vend my contact information from my contact management system to generate those emails or to generate those, those communications. When are custom yep. Can newer custom scopes be added by the user for more choice while viewing filtered contact list? So, yes, under company setup, we have scopes of work. This is where you can basically set up and specify what particular scopes. You know, are they aggregate? Are they concrete? Are they electrical? Are they a sub? Are they an asphalt paving sub? You know, it's purely up to you how you want to define those scopes of work, and then you can go into the contacts and apply those scopes of work, to each company. Did I get all the questions? I think I did. Yes. You got all the questions. Does anyone have any other questions while we're we have this up on the screen about anything we talked about today? Estimate insights, contact management, or just general questions about heavy bed preconstruction. Alright. If we don't see any more questions, I'm gonna turn it back over to Melissa and Robert then. Alright. Okay. So that concludes, you know, Robert's, description of what it was like, really, how things were done before, you know, streamlining the estimating workflows to after when he's connecting heavy bid, preconstruction to heavy bid. I hope that was helpful for everyone just to see real life scenarios. And so, essentially, the benefits of connecting preconstruction to heavy bid is you're really just centralizing information. Right? You're saving time. You're reducing risk and headaches. And before, a lot of you might be using Excel, email, CRM systems to manage everything. And now with preconstruction, you can really centralize your data into one source of truth. And the results, you know, you're gonna eliminate outdated info, human errors, right, and inefficient processes. And this is a visual just like we talked about just now, just to kinda make it easy to take a step back and look at what what are we doing currently before the estimated process. Right? So a lot a lot of customers are sometimes tracking potential work on Salesforce, Excel, collecting all the project details in another Excel sheet, entering the contact details in Salesforce. Right? Add the bid dates to your Outlook. And then sometimes, like Robert talked about, sometimes we're keeping bid review dates on an Excel tab. You know? So there's all it's not connected. Right? It's, it's not efficient. And then finally, when you get to the estimating process, you can hop on over to heavy bed. But to save time, you can really streamline those estimated workflows by connecting heavy bed preconstruction to heavy bed. So this is just kind of a visual of, like, how streamlined it could be. And, yes, that concludes our webinar, but I would love to hear if anyone has any more questions. And, again, we'll share this recording with you all as well as some helpful one pagers to kind of explain how to bid preconstruction as well. So one of the questions that came up was having the or, basically, can we demo quick pricing? I know that was not necessarily part of the talking points today, but Robert did, did throw in a plug for quick pricing. So bear with me just a moment. I'm, I'm going to change my accounts real quick, and I'll demo quick pricing. Thanks, Erin. Alright. So Alright. So quick pricing is a great tool because it allows you to to get a a perspective feel on how big a project might become, and it utilizes your your historical, average prices from your bid item code book, essentially to gather that information. So how do we do that? Within project detail, we we essentially have an option on the far right called quick price sheet. Now to to start the project, is it, it's as simple as clicking the button for new quick price sheet, and you get a couple options here. You get an option to create from your pay item library, or you get an option to create from estimate history. Now, for better or for worse, in my my particular spot, I've got a bunch of accounts. And this one, it's set up, for the pay item library, not for estimate history. So we're gonna demo the the pay item library, in this case. But, essentially, what we do is we specify what library we're going to grab the average pricing from. In this case, I'm gonna grab it from my twenty twenty four TxDOT, code book. Now the next thing we wanna do is we want to bring in the owner's items. Now if we do not have the owner's items, we can manually do the this next step. But if we have the owner's items, we can essentially just go in, pick, our import sheet, and HeavyBid's gonna or, Precon's gonna automatically bring it in. Now we get a preview validation based on our column mapping right above. We wanna make sure that we verify everything looks good. So I've got my text dot codes. I've got my description, my quantities, and my units. Everything looks good. So I'm gonna click next to proceed to my next step. Now at this stage, Precon is essentially going to compare the TxDOT code against, what you have in your code book. You do have the option here to go in and choose a different one. In in a lot of states, they might have several instances of the the same thing. In this case, I've got, a couple options for for aggregates here. If I wanted to, I could come in and change which one I pulled from. If I knew I had one that had data and one that didn't, I can change, which item to grab my average from. Now in this case, I'm gonna leave it exactly as is, and I'm going to click next. Precon's gonna automatically look at the average price in my code book and come up with a unit price, multiply that against my quantity, in my in my sheet or in my, my item list, and give me, an actual price based on my historical averages. Now is this as accurate as you going in and bidding the estimate? No. You still wanna go in and build your bid, but this gives you a, a really good scope as to how big this project is potentially going to be and whether or not you want to pursue taking the time investment to to go in and actually build out that estimate. Once I once I verify everything looks good, I click save to project, and now that's showing up in my quick price sheet. Sneak peek. One of the things that we are working on for the twenty twenty five dot one release is we're looking to bring that quick price information from my project detail into my estimate, both during estimate creation as well as after the fact. If I bring in a quick price sheet, I can bring that item list from my quick pricing screen into my estimate, saving me the trouble of having to reimport it down the road. Alright. Any questions on, quick pricing? I Don't have a question on that specifically, but we do have one about, do you all anticipate the ability to add custom fields into the contact management, similar to what projects contact management, feature. Keith, I do not know the answer to that question off the top of my head, but I can definitely, dig in and, get you a response to that. Thank you. Do we have any more questions? And Paul just answered in the chat. Keith, that will be expanding fields available. But right now, we don't have customized fields on the road map. Alright. Any questions for Robert? Any more pro tips? You wanna ask him about Aaron here? Okay. Well, I think that's a wrap. Thank you. Thank you, Robert, for, lending your time and sharing, how you use the system and the helpful tips. We really appreciate it. I hope this was really helpful for all all of you who want to learn more about preconstruction and hopefully start adopting those, streamlined workflows. And, yeah, and please, look out for an email from us. We'll have the recording here, a one pager about the free versus paid, features for preconstruction along, with some other materials. Alright. Thank you guys so much. Have a great rest of your day, everyone. Have a good day, everybody. Thanks, guys. Thank you.