Estimating Monthly Webinar November 2024

Let's go ahead and get started. Melissa, are you in here right now? Alright. While she figures that out, I'm going to hop in. So, we have both myself and Melissa here today. I am the technical product manager specializing in heavy bid preconstruction. That's what we're going to be looking over today. With me joining in just a minute, we also have Melissa Teague, who is our product marketing manager and helps with some of the, branding and messaging that we use so that we're able to convey the value that we are providing, in a way that makes sense for everybody and kinda help show you what it what all it can be used for. For the oh, just a second. It looks like people might not be able to hear me right now. Can I either get people in chat or okay? We do have people that are able to. Awesome. Alright. We will continue on here then. For the webinar agenda today, we're first going to be looking at quick pricing. That is the the main event of this. It's a new feature that was released earlier on this month, and we'll go through what it can be used for as well as how to actually use it. We'll do a quick little survey for anybody who's interested for heavy bid users, with a chance to win an Arctic cooler. And then any questions and answers, any questions that you guys have, I'm more than happy to go over, for the new quick pricing feature. And then finally, a quick little reminder about UGM registration. So let's hop over to oops. Here we go. The first poll question Sorry. Running into technical difficulties as well here. First poll question is, are there estimates that you, start work on and then realize after you've already started on this estimate, dedicated some time that you run into the realization that this probably wasn't worth building an estimate for in the first place, even a preliminary one? If you're targeting, you know, thirty percent profit and you end up starting on this estimate and realizing this is gonna be an at cost kind of thing. We have a very solid majority right now with a guest and a couple of people that are have a really good gut feeling, I guess, that have not run into this problem before. We'll go ahead and end this poll. We had eighty seven percent of people say yes, and thirteen that are either have a really good gut feeling or have gotten lucky with it so far, and have not run into this. This is a common problem, though, as we see reflected in the poll, that we see people running into, which is how do I know which projects are worth estimating in the first place, even for that preliminary estimate, to make sure that they're lining up with our resource goals, with our financial goals, and with the business decisions that we're trying to make at any given point within the year. So when you're tracking these potential opportunities, are you calculating the percentage of opportunities that were a no go? Some of them, as we just saw, are going to end up being a no go, and some of them are going to be worth pursuing. But do you know when you're running into an issue? Let's see. Sorry. The the poll question will be coming up in just a second here. Here. Do you run into a time when, you look back on which ones were worth pursuing and which ones weren't? This is especially important for our business development representatives who are trying to figure out which opportunities to go after. If eighty percent of the opportunities that you're looking at end up not being worth your time, then that may be a a flag for you to be able to go in and realize, let's look at other ways of improving that process to make sure, that we're going after the right opportunities. You don't wanna spend a lot of extra opportunity or sorry, a lot of extra time on opportunities that weren't going to fit in the first place. So we'll get back to this one in just a second, but let's, hop into what it looks like inside of quick pricing. So, sorry. That should have been still in slideshow. Chat. So what is quick pricing? This is a way for you to take historical data, and we'll there's there's an asterisk there, but we'll get into that once we actually look at the demo on the program, to make high level project cost estimates. This is not meant to replace your estimating process. This is meant to act as a way to help it. So help with your go, no go decisions to see, is it even worth bringing to your estimators in the first place because it's kind of close to what you're looking for. So the people that this is going to really help are, first off, executives so that they can see both why an opportunity was declined and get a better idea of which opportunities you're going after, and what the supporting information for that was. If we're looking at the example on screen, if my total price is a hundred and seventy eight million, my total cost is a hundred and sixty one million, and I'm looking only at this point, I'm already booked out for the year, so I'm looking looking for at least a fifty percent profit. This isn't worth going after. But maybe if times are real slow and I'm just trying to make sure that that, we have enough work to continue through the year, I've knocked that down to, you know, ten percent profit margin, and this may make sense to go ahead and start into the actual estimating process. But quick views like this are, very valuable tools to be able to bring into those Monday or Friday meetings to take a look at all the different options that we have and make sure that we're using the data that we have to make these decisions. This is also going to save estimators time. Like I just mentioned, if something is kind of on the fence, maybe you're looking at, ten percent profit margin, and this one is at, like, nine or eleven. Maybe it's worth estimating, and maybe it's not. But this gives you the opportunity to decide if it's worth syncing that time and, taking up some of the time of one of your estimators. And then finally, if it just blows all the criteria out of the water, obviously, that's a great way to be able to prioritize the order for which you should go after these projects. This is this feature primarily focuses on the financial aspect of it based on historical data, but you do also have other criteria that are included in there. And so, being able to use this as one of the pillars that you're using to make decisions can speed up that process and make sure that you're going after the right opportunities in the right. So let's go ahead and hop into what it looks like inside Precon itself. Hopefully, this looks relatively okay. Awesome. So we will hop into one of these projects here. This is example one. A quick little note on this. The quick pricing sheet and the quick pricing feature is only available to our, full feature customers. So if you are on the free license, this will not be available to you until you upgrade and have at least one license that is on the full feature version of precon. But assuming you are on the full feature, any project that you go into the project details for, on this right hand side, you will see quick price sheet and new quick price sheet. So let me go ahead and click that. And we have two options here, and this is where that asterisk comes in from earlier. So for the majority of our current customers, you'll be using this one, this create from estimate history. And what this is going to do is use prices and cost data from estimates that you have created inside HeavyBid and have synchronized, up to precon in order to create data for, averages for future work. So if I have a particular bid item or pay item, and let's pretend that that's the only item on this entire bid. If I'm using estimate history, it's going to search through every estimate that I've ever done inside HeavyBid and either synced or archived. I can then filter down and say only include ones from the past three years. And it's going to look at every single estimate within those past three years or whatever other filters you put in, and it will find every instance of that bid item, and it will provide you with information based on those. The other option that we have up at the top here, create from pay item library, is if you have not been using HeavyBid, if you have a different system and you have a list of known costs or sorry, a list of known prices, you can use that in order to create something similar. So this might be for shorter cycle work. If you're not doing full estimates inside, HeavyBid, you can use this pay item library and come up with the the prices that way. So real quick before I jump into this, these two processes are very, very similar, but I do wanna show you where to upload the information if you're doing this pay item library. So over on this left hand side, under cuts under customized setup, we have a new item down at the bottom here that says pay item library. I've already imported one in here, but if you want to import a new one, literally, you just click the import button. It's going to walk you through here. So you'll choose the owner. In this case, we'll do Amanda a construction. Version name, version two, and we choose a file that we want to import here. Now I've already created one just for the sake of time. So I'm going to upload that here. We can see this is the file that's being used. And then if it's more than one sheet, I can choose which sheet from within that Excel file I want to use. Scrolling down, I've done this in the past, so it just went ahead and copied over that mapping. But I can choose which of those columns are supposed to be the code, the description, the unit price, and the unit. And then down here, it will walk me through and say, based on the data you've provided and the mapping you've provided, here is what it looks like. And so I've just included a bunch of example items here. But we have our code. We have our description for that pay item or that bid item. We have the price, and we have the units. And then down at the very bottom, we have the validation to make sure that I don't have duplicates of anything in there and that there are no other issues with it. If there were, it would be showing right here. But in this case, we show everything's fine, so we're good to go. Now the one that I was showing right there is this exact same codebook. So I've put those in here, and we can see I have our owner and our version. So you can have different prices based on different, project owners if you want to break it out that way. Now let's hop back into one of these projects and look at what it actually looks like to do it this way. So over here, again, in project details, right hand side, quick price sheet. I'm going to create a new quick price sheet. In this case, I've been using HeavyBid, and so I want to create from estimate history. I wanted to use all that data that I've included in, HeavyBid to create the price and cost for this project. If I've been given a, bid template that has all of my bid items on there, I can go ahead and import that here. If not, I can skip this step, and I can add them in manually. Now in this case, I'm going to demo as though I was given, let's say, TxDOT gave me a, a a list of bid items. I'm going to go ahead and click here. I don't know if it's showing up. Oh, it does. Perfect. I'm going to take the import that I want to include here. Again, exact same process as we just saw. We have our file. We choose which sheet we want. We put in our mapping. And then down at the bottom, it shows based on what you've chosen, here's the information we're getting and any validation errors. In this case, I don't have any, so I can go ahead and press next. And it's going to bring me to the the main page where I'm linking things. So on this page, we see a couple of different things. But first, let's look at these bottom seven here. So what it did was it looked at the code that I included in the thing that I just up to, uploaded here, the thing I just imported, my bid template. And it said, hey. You had, code zero zero zero space one zero zero zero. It then looked into HeavyBid, and it said, do you have this client number anywhere in HeavyBid? If the answer is yes, then it went ahead and linked that for me. And you can see it did that for these seven. But there were two items here where the code that I provided in my import from my project owner don't exist anywhere in my heavy bid system. So it tells me, you need to tell me what this means. So in my case, the gutter installation that was provided by my project owner as a bid item, I'm going to link. And for me, in my, heavy bid, the closest that that lines up with is clear and grub site. The cold mix gravel subway, will show in just a second. I actually wanna show one more thing first. So we showed uploading nine. Let's say I got nine from my project owner, but I know there's, like, three more bid items that need to go on here. Or if I skipped the import altogether and I need to manually add them. I just go up to the top here to add project pay item, and I can add in anything that I need to. So we'll do code one two three four five six. Description is test item, Quantity of fifty two and unit of linear feet. We'll go ahead and add that in, and you can see now we have this item right here. So first, we're going to, go ahead and link this cold mix. And for me, again, in my heavy bid system, the closest thing to that is this fine grade and finish subgrade. And then we have one more item on here. Just a second. Sorry. I have a little bit of a sore throat here, so I may be muting a few times. But this test item that I know needs to be added on to this project, I actually don't have anything similar in HeavyBid, unfortunately. This is a new kind of item that I'm doing. So what I'm going to do is link item. And then up at the top, instead of searching through my existing items, I can manually add one in. So here, we'll do code one two three four five six. Description is still test item. And then I'm going to manually add in my average unit price and unit cost based on information that lives outside HeavyBid. This could be my best guess. This could be something that I have, an estimate from the project owner. This could be something that's on the TxDOT site where they've listed out here all the different bid items and their average cost and or average price over the past, year or however long. But somewhere, I'm going to take external data, and I'm going to put it in here as kind of a best guess. This doesn't need to be perfect. Again, this is not an estimate. This is just a tool to help me with my go, no go decision. So in this case, my average price is, fifteen dollars, and my cost is twelve dollars. And I'm going to go ahead and link that in. You can see now up at the top, since we have all of these linked, there's no longer an error, and I'm able to click next. So I have all of the items from my from my project owner, and I have linked to them to items that are either in heavy bid or I have manually added in because they don't exist in heavy bid. I'm going to click next, and now is when we need to narrow down. Like I said at the beginning, this is using every single estimate that is that exists in heavy bid and has been pushed up to precon. So I might have data in here from, you know, nineteen ninety five. I don't want my costs and my prices for these bid items from nineteen ninety five. That's not accurate data, and that's not going to produce a good rough estimate. I want to limit that. So I might go in and narrow it down by owner and say, I only want things for TextBot. I don't wanna include the work that I do in Louisiana. I don't want those costs and prices in this estimate that in this example I'm doing for TxDOT. I might say, I only want bids that are in the, awarded status. I don't wanna include things that are still being estimated or things that I lost. I might wanna include a particular bid total. If I know that the minimum for this job is likely to be roughly two million, I don't wanna include bid items on estimates that were only two hundred thousand. So I can narrow all of these down. And if I have particular estimates that I know are really gonna throw things off, maybe I did a project at cost for a project owner to strengthen relationships with them or as a one off for some other reason, I can specifically exclude them by entering the estimate code here. If I have things that I know are going to be excluded by my filters, but I purposefully want to include them anyway, I can also switch this over and say I want to include estimates by estimate code. Now for the sake of, example here actually, we'll we'll go ahead and show you one thing here. So in this case, I'll do text dot, and I'll say I only wanna include from the last year. I know I'm missing data, on estimates for a lot of this, but that's okay. We're going to run analysis anyway. And so it's going to go through. And with these criteria, it's going to say, hey. There's some stuff that is not included. In this case, it's just the test item because this is one that I manually added. So because this was manually added, obviously, it's not anywhere in estimate history. So it's going to give me a chance to change these items. If I make this even more strenuous and I say, just include it in the last month and make the estimator, j k here, it's going to probably not find very much at all. And so now it's going to say, hey. Based on your filters, I wasn't able to find information for these bid items. I need you to fill in this information so that I know what to produce for you. So if that's the case, I can either relax the, filters that I have here, or I can manually put in information. Most of the time, we don't want very many things manually input because the point of this system is to use historical data or known data to create it for you. So in this case, we'll go ahead and just relax all of ours and let it search everything and all of estimate history for me and run analysis. And, again, here, this is, just the one item that I already knew was not going to be an estimate history or in, heavy bid because I manually entered it. So at this point, I say fifteen is my best guess for the price. Twelve is my best guess for the cost. Let's go ahead and run this. And what it's going to do is go through and add all of this up for me. So it'll say based on your filters, here is your lowest price that we ever found for this item based on your filters. Here's the average price, and here's the highest price. Then with that average, let's go ahead and bring that all the way down. So we'll do the price times the quantity. We get the total. And we have the same thing, the lowest cost that we found at any point based on your filters, the average cost, and the high cost. And then same thing. Total cost is the, unit cost times the quantity. You'll notice the other thing on here is we have this little, icon. And what this means is all of this information was pulled from a known source. This in this case, it came from HeavyBid. However, this one was manually entered by a user. So this is just a way of making sure that if there is something that was not from HeavyBid, it's it's marked here so that you know which things are maybe a little bit more trustworthy and maybe which things are are more gut feels or guesses. So at this point, we have our total price. We have our total cost. We can save it to the project, and it gives us the total price, total cost, number of pay items or bid items, and who created this. Now I can go up here, and I can download the PDF. And you'll notice there's a new part at the bottom here that is quick price sheet. If I have that checked, it'll show that same screen that we just saw a second ago that gives the line item details for each of those bid items. So it'll show total price, total cost, low, high, and average for price and cost, and then, obviously, the code description, unit, and, quantity. So that is how to use it for anybody that's using HeavyBid. I will take questions in just a second, but I wanna very quickly run through, one other thing on here, which is if you do not use HeavyBid and you have some other source. So we saw earlier under customized setup, we were able to add a pay item library. So let me just delete this real quick. If I'm doing it from there, same thing. I'm gonna new quick. Excuse me. I'm going to do new quick press sheet and create from pay item library. Now we have one additional step in the beginning, which is selecting which pay item library to use. So in this case, we only have one owner that we've created one for, but we do have two versions. If you do work for a lot of different people and you're not using HappyBid as your your source of information for this, you're likely to have several different owners. But if you do work for different sides of a county or for, different sides of a city or something, then maybe you have different pre agreed upon prices. This is where you might have different versions. So let's do the Sugar Land MSA and click next. Exact same thing. I can import, or if I can't import, I can manually add steps in a moment, but we're going to import for sake of brevity. Choose our file. Again, we have, in this case, seven of the nine already linked, so I'm going to quickly link in. Gutter installation is clear and grub, and the cold mix is fine grade. Again, up at the top, it's the exact same process. I can add project pay items. You'll notice there's not a way to add in new, things to be able to link it to. That's because our pay item library needs to contain every piece of of data for us. Us. We can't add that on the fly like we could with our heavy bid version. Once we have everything linked up here, we click next. Because we're already using known prices from our pay item library, we only have one price on each of these items. So there's no low low, high, and average, and there's no filtering. It just goes ahead and spits this out. And then same thing when I save this to the project over on this right hand side, once it loads in, if I can click the button. Over here, we have our total price. We have our number of pay items, and we have who created it and when. So we can within the span of, at least for this version, within the span of about forty five seconds, we can have a rough idea of what that price is that at least tells us the ballpark we're in for it. With the version that uses HeavyBid as a source of information, it may take a little bit longer, but you're still looking at under five minutes to go from just a a bid item list from your project owner to having a rough idea of your cost and price based on the historical averages that you decide are relevant to your project. Alrighty. We can actually, we'll keep that on for now. Let's switch back over here, and we will do one more quick poll. So based on what you've seen here, is this something that is valuable to you? Do you see yourself adding quick pricing to your decision making process, taking those forty five seconds or certainly sub five minutes, to be able to add this in to your decision making process for potential opportunities? Let's see if we can get that poll started here. There we go. Everybody should be able to see it now. Alright. Looks like we got about seventy five, twenty five percent. I would be very interested for, anybody that either has, a unique use case for this or anybody who this would not help. I'd be interested in learning more about your process. I'll have my email up at the end of this. But if you're in either of those camps, I would love to hear from you and and learn a little bit more about the process that you go through, and how we can kinda support that with you. Alright. One quick little announcement before we hop into the q and a here. We do have a survey going on for any of our heavy bid users. If you scan the QR code on the screen in the middle here, there is a chance to win an Arctic cooler. We wanna be able to hear from you guys about the heavy bid experience. So I'll give you another, like, ten or fifteen seconds to screenshot or pull out your phone or whatever you want to do, to hop in here just in case you are interested in joining us for this survey. Alright. Onto the question and answers. I know we had a few people that had dropped, information or, sorry, dropped questions in here. Does the code search review review both bid items and client numbers or just client numbers? The code search only reviews client numbers, and the reason is because those bid item numbers change from estimate to estimate. So we specifically compare it to the client numbers that you have, in your codebooks. Arthur said, the mobilization varies wildly. Can you manually enter value as a best guess and ignore the historical? Just a second. Let me Sorry. Let me just quickly hop into the area that I think you're talking about. Oops. Yes. I probably should have set up a a separate file that where I don't have to link anything or it's all already linked. But like I said, it only takes a couple seconds to go through this whole thing. Next. Oh, so this next. So I believe you're talking about on this screen, if you can override one of the pieces in here rather than rather than using the cost and price that it shows. The answer is not currently. So right now, it has the numbers that were generated. And if you manually add something in, then you can type out the best guess. The way that you would, address this, a, we're looking at an improvement in the future already, where you are able to override the price or cost, and it will show, obviously, that a a user changed to that. But in the current version, rather than linking it to an item in your, in your historical data, you can manually enter it. So let me go back a couple of steps and show what that looks like. On this screen, we saw there were two that I added in, but let's say that the, RC pipe twenty four inch, it it does have something in, heavy bid, but I know that I want to put in something else. I can just unlink that. Oops. I did not mean to delete that. Okay. We're going to ignore that for just a second. I can click right here. And even though it already found something for me, I can just change that and manually add in something myself. So we'll just do one, two, three, RC pipe. I think this was a thirty six inch thirty inch. And then I can just manually put in whatever price and cost I want. So do twenty and twenty fifteen, something like that. So even though it was able to find a bid item in my estimate history, that match via client number, If I want to manually enter a value, I can just switch that over, by clicking on this and telling I wanna link to something else, and the something else I wanna link to is this manual ad. And then as we go through, again, it will show that automatically. Anytime I change something, I need to rerun which filters I'm using. So here, I can change those numbers. I put in the average in that previous step, but if I also wanted to include a low and a high that aren't the average, I can change that here. And then when I click next, you can see down at the bottom, it shows I changed this. So in the future, you might be able to change it on a screen more like this or the previous screen. But for now, you would just say don't use the heavy bid info. Instead, use the info that I'm going to provide here. We have any other questions on use cases for this or how to get it to work or anything like that? Can this be pushed to heavy bid to build your tree view? Not right this second. Give me half a second here. The current version of HeavyBid and the current version of Precon do not allow this. However, in, I believe, twenty twenty five dot one give me just a second to confirm that so I don't give you the wrong information. In q four of twenty twenty five, we are expecting there to be a button in Precon here, just like we have edit and delete that says, start an estimate with this. And it will do exactly what you're talking about. Sorry. Actually, for, desktop, you'll do it from the desktop side, and you'll say, I want to start a new estimate from this project, and you'll have the option to pull in the quick price sheet. In which case, it will take here, we have eight pay items. So it'll take those eight bid items, put them into tree view, and prepopulate them with the prices. You can then obviously change this out. It's not locked in. You can adjust those prices. You can start fiddling, but it will at least bring those in as a base step for you to be able to build off of and change as you go. Can we email out a copy of the webinar so that we can go back and watch it again? Yes. I believe there will be an email going out, I wanna say, next week with the link. And then we also put it on help dot h c s s dot com. And, again, it usually takes a few days for it to process, but this will be available, after Thanksgiving is a a very safe bet, if you want to rewatch how this is done. We also have help articles on how to, go through and do this, and I believe we have a promotional video as well that kind of explains what it is and a very brief idea of how to use it, in case you wanna send this to anybody else in the company. But the the recording of this specific webinar will be available, within a week, week and a half. We have about sixty more seconds, and then we can hop into the UGM reminder, and we'll be good to go. Alright. Last thing on the docket then. Sorry. Let me go ahead and put this up there. For anybody that does have questions after this, I am always available via email, paul dot lambert at h t s s dot com. Feel free to reach out if you want, more information about it, if you have improvements, if you have a request for it. If you answered that this would not be something going into your decision making process, or if you think you have a unique use case on how this is used, I would love to connect with you and talk more about your process. But I am always available via email. Feel free to to send that anytime. One quick little last reminder. We have UGM coming up February eighteenth to twentieth of next year. If you want to register, either go to UGM dot h g s s dot com, or scan the QR code on your screen right now. We will be having more information coming out about this, obviously, as we get closer. But I know that I will be speaking during the the town hall and also leading a couple of the classes there, so I look very much forward to, meeting everybody and getting a chance to talk with you. Last thing, if you have any other questions outside of things going to me, feel free to reach out to our support team. We have both the phone number and the email right here for you. They are very responsive, and do a very good job. They are as knowledgeable as anybody else in the company and then some about all of our products. So any problems that you run into, definitely reach out to support or to myself, and we will get, everything straightened out for you. With that, I think we've wrapped up the webinar. Thank you all very much for coming out, and I look forward to seeing you guys in January for our next webinar.