HeavyBid Monthly Webinar April 2024

Alright, everybody. Looks like we're we're about, leveling off here with the number of attendees that are joining us. So welcome to the monthly webinar series for April. I'm your host, Aaron Allshaus. I am the technical product manager for HeavyBid. Joining me today is, Paul Lambert and Amanda Isles. They're gonna be helping me field questions slash answer any questions that for whatever reason I can't answer. And tell me when somebody, has a question that I don't see. So the topic of today's presentation is what's new with HeavyBid twenty twenty four. So HeavyBid twenty twenty four was a pretty feature packed, release. We had thirty nine bug fixes. We had forty maintenance items. We had forty one improvement items. We had thirty one release task items, giving us a grand total of one hundred and fifty one total items. So with a one hundred and fifty one total items, there's no possible way that we can cover all of those items in in the span of one hour. So I'm gonna target, what we're gonna discuss today to these particular items here. So we made quite a few updates to system vendors. We updated or we created a field for alternate quantities. We're gonna go through what that means and what you can do with it. We made a few adjustments to the cost and price report plus. We made adjustments for off shift hours and calendars. We're gonna talk about what off shift hours are and how we made adjustments towards counting those towards estimated days. We're going to talk about how we made some changes in bid pricing that deal with negative takeoff quantities. We're gonna talk about how we adjust, the schedule, scheduling description for export to scheduling software such as, p six or a project, and we're gonna talk about the audit trail. So without further ado, let's jump right into let's jump right into heavy bid here. So bear with me while I change what is being shared here. And the first thing we're gonna take a look at is, system vendor changes. So gonna move my webinar menu right out of the way because it's covering up the menus here in HeavyBid. But what we made a change for in HeavyBid twenty twenty four is we began the phase of allowing you, the end user, to move your system wide vendor business contacts from within HeavyBid up to Precon's contact management solution. Now why did we do that? We did that, because contact management is going to be the one stop solution for all of HCSS to manage your vendors. So instead of having to update your vendor list in your CRM, then update them in HeavyBid, then update them in HeavyJob, and whatever else, whatever else HCSS product that you have, we're gonna be creating, integration between CRM your CRM, and contact management, allowing you to update your contacts in one centralized location, and it will update across your HCSS products. So in order to do that, we basically need to tell HeavyBid that we're gonna use contact management instead of your system wide vendor business contacts. For anyone unfamiliar with what I am, describing, under your subsystems menu, you have a vendor business contact menu. This is your system wide vendors. You'll see here I have a couple in here to start with. And, basically, any associated information that I have along with that would show up here. So any of my, vendor addresses, any of my vendor contacts, anything like that. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna tell HeavyBid how to communicate with contact management. And to do that, the first thing we need to do is turn it on. So we're gonna go up to tools. We're gonna go over to preferences and system. Now all the way down at the bottom, we have a system preference for web applications. We're going to expand that, and we're going to select contact management. If you are using production history or estimate history, there shouldn't be any additional, setup needed. However, if you are if you are not utilizing any of those, you will need to enter in your system credential setup. For any additional information on how to to begin that process, we can give support a call, or you can shoot me an email after this webinar, and I'll help you get set up. But for the sake of this demonstration, we're gonna go over to contact management, and you're gonna see quite a lot of options here. The good news is you don't have to click on any of those individually. We're gonna do all that for you. But just as a as a refresher here, if you're unsure of what this feature does, you get a little, text notification here. Enabling contact management moves the maintenance of system vendors to the web and pre construction's contact management module. So, basically, what we're doing is we're going through and we are going through a few checks here. So we're checking if you have a credentials login. That's that system credentials set up that we just looked at. We have estimate history is enabled. User defined fields are not used. So if you have any system wide vendor user defined fields, we don't have an equivalent to that in contact management. So if you were to send that data up to contact management, you would lose that information. Regions are not used. We're gonna be changing, how this functionality plays out in, precon in the in the future. So we are not going to be bringing this legacy function over. So if you use region setup and system wide vendors, that information would not translate up. Current division is mapped to a business unit. So if you are an enterprise user, we wanna make sure that your division in HeavyBid is mapped to a business unit in preconstruction so that the data is sent to the correct location. No other divisions are mapped to the same business unit. So if you were an enterprise user and you had multiple divisions in heavy bid that were mapped to the same BU in preconstruction, you would have the potential for two divisions worth of system wide vendors being sent to the same location in preconstruction, contact management. We don't wanna do that by default. However, we can bypass that, if you want to keep your keep both divisions using the same, system wide vendors. Next thing we're looking at is to make sure that the login you're using has access to the business unit that you're trying to send the data to. We're also making sure that the credentials login has access to pre construction. So can do we have access to to modify, add and modify data in contact management? And do we have the ability to handle existing records in contact management? So if I have contacts in contact management, what do we wanna do with that? And we're gonna talk about that here in just a minute. So we're essentially gonna click the enable button here, and HeavyBid's gonna go down the list to make sure everything is good. In this case, handle existing records. So in contact management, I actually have a couple records already added there, just for the sake of demonstration in order to show you this message. So even if you have vendors in both locations, HeavyBid's going to ask you a question. And that is, yes, give heavy bid priority for duplicate records. So, basically, if the the vendor codes match between what's in heavy bid and what's in, contact management, the data from heavy bid is going to overwrite the data in contact management. Yes. Give contact management priority for duplicate records. Basically, what that's saying is I wanna use whatever is in contact management in lieu of what's in heavy bid. And then, no, only use what is in contact management. Basically, what that means is, no, I am not going to sync any of my vendor data up from HeavyBid to contact management. I'm just going to use what is currently in contact management. For the sake of demonstration here, we're gonna, tell, HeavyBid we're gonna use HeavyBid's vendor business contacts. So when we sync the data up, if there are any duplicate records, we're gonna overwrite those duplicate records in contact management with what's in HeavyBid. So we're gonna click okay. What heavy what HeavyBid's gonna do is it's going to make a system wide backup of your data as it sits right now. So that way, if you made this change and you decided, no. This is not for me, we can restore your data as it is right now so that there is no, no loss no loss of data. You're gonna get a notification saying contact management was successfully enabled. You go ahead, click okay, and you're gonna see the options disappear here. Because everything's enabled, we know we passed the validation. If in the future you want to disable this function, you're just gonna come back to this menu and click disable. Now what that means is under my subsystems menu, where my system wide vendor business contacts were, we have replaced that icon with a new icon for contact management. When I click that button, HeavyBid is going to take me to my preconstruction site along with in my contact management module. So in this case, everything is going to show what I sent up from HeavyBid into, excuse me, into contact management. Just like within, HeavyBid system wide vendor business contacts, I can go into any one vendor, and I can input information. So I can add vendor contacts. I can also edit my vendor data, and I can bring in company information. So what type of company is it? Is it a sub? I can create new company types. I can bring in minority statuses. I can input notes. I can put in their addresses right here, and I can bring in different scopes of work. Scopes of work are the equivalent to a product. Mandy, you've got your hand raised. Go ahead. We can only see your heavy bid if you're showing off Precon. Oops. Sorry about that. Let's go here. Okay. Can you see my precon screen? Yes. Perfect. So sorry about that, everybody. So in preconstruction let's start back. Basically, when I click that contact management button, it's going to take me to this screen. It's gonna open up preconstruction. It's gonna take me to my contact management company list. So this is no different than if I went to system wide vendor business setup, and I click the button, the ellipsis button next to my vendor code, and it brings up my list of vendors. This is the the equivalent of that. Basically, in here, I have the same abilities that I had within, system wide vendor business contacts. I can go in. I can click on any of my vendors, and I'm going to see my vendor information. If I had any contacts, I would see that information here. I can go ahead and I can add a contact. If I wanted to make myself a contact, I can go in and I can put in any any information here. In case anybody is curious, here is my, HCSS email, aaron dot alshaus at hcss dot com. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to to shoot me an email. And I can go ahead and I can add any additional information that I want. If I wanna make myself the main contact for this company, I can do so. And I'm just gonna go ahead and click add, and now my contact is going to show up here. Now I can also edit my company information. So I can go ahead and I can update my company name. I can input minority statuses, company types, notes, is my company bonded, my bond rate, my accounting code, for for those Viewpoint customers. I can put in my office address information. So I can go ahead and I can fill out whatever information that I want, and all I need to do is just, click save. Oh, office nickname is required. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put in main, and I'll click save here. So we won't let you save the data in the event that you don't completely fill out the information properly. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna save my changes. I'm gonna make sure that everything, loads here. It's taking a little bit of time to load. I'm not exactly sure why it's taking a little bit of time to load, but in this event, it is. K. So one of the questions, came up. Show how this works with adding a vendor on the fly in the quote sheet and how you can push those on the fly vendors to contact management. So that is a great question. We're gonna get to that here in just a second. So, basically, the question is, how does that information translate from heavy bid up to contact management? And if I make changes in contact management, how does that come back down to heavy bid? So right now, it's running a little bit slow. I'm not exactly sure why it's running slow, but we have automatic sync built in. So what does that mean? Whenever I go back into HeavyBid and let me make sure that I am sharing HeavyBid here. So whenever I go back into HeavyBid, when I go and do certain things in HeavyBid, that data will resync down from contact management into HeavyBid. So certain things like coming into the quote summary. So if I go to subsystems and go to quotes, it's going to resync. When I go into a quote sheet, it's going to resync. It's going to bring that data down from, from contact management back into HeavyBid. We have a couple others. I can't remember all of the syncs we have off the top of my head, but I think we have five different operations in HeavyBid that will sync that data back down. Now the question became, if I add somebody on the fly, let's say I add, you know, a webinar vendor. I added a vendor. The way HeavyBid works is when I add a vendor on the fly, it adds that vendor to my local vendor database. Now, previously, we can go back to the quote summary, and I can go over here to my options, and I can copy local vendors to my system wide vendors. Well, now you'll see that option to copy local vendors is now changed to copy local vendors to contact management. I can go ahead and I can see all of my local vendors here for this particular estimate. I can select them. In this case, I already know these local vendors are already in my system wide with the exception of webinar. I can go ahead and select that for webinar, and I can click copy down here in the bottom right. That's going to copy my local vendor up to contact management. So let's jump back to preconstruction here, and we're going to see that, that vendor show up here. So bear with me here. Share pre con here. And I'm just refreshing the page here, so bear with me while that shows up. And you'll see webinar already shows up in my list. So I see a I see a couple questions here. Can team members that do not have heavy bid preconstruction, that can team members that do not have heavy bid access slash preconstruction contact management? So preconstruction is part of the heavy bid product, and I'm just reading the response here from Paul, is part of the heavy bid product in HCSS credentials. So users must have access. However, they can be on the free license and still view contacts and contact management. So, basically, make all that short. Users' access and contact management must have heavy bid access in credentials. So for whatever reason, if you do not want users having access to the company list or to contact management within preconstruction, Under their credentials account, you just remove the access, essentially to, preconstruction, and they will not have access to this. If you are a, a paid user Paul, please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe we either have the ability to limit their access to contact management or that is something that's on the roadmap for the future. That's correct. If you have a user inside the paid version of, preconstruction, you can limit their ability to add and edit, contacts within contact management. K. Perfect. So, another question came up. I know it may be a big ask, but is there a way to have a hide vendors already in contact management in that update contact management with local vendor screen? So, basically, just hide the vendors, hide the vendors that don't already exist in in contact management. So for for anyone curious what, what that user is asking is here in copy local vendors to contact management. We're looking for a way just simply to filter out any vendor here that does not currently exist in in contact management. So that is actually a great idea. I'll make a note of that here, and we'll see about putting that in in the in the future release here. Amanda, go ahead. Yeah. I also interpreted that the other way as far as, like, I wanna be able to highlight just the vendors I need to push up because they're not already in my contact management. So I wanna hide all the ones that are already system wide and see the ones that aren't so I know, I need to add that to my system. So that's exciting. That sounds like a good a good Okay. Good little feature as well. Alright. Amanda, you are you are correct. So we will we will definitely take a look at adding that in a future release. The next question that came in centered around this is, will products, will the products field in the current system wide vendors sync up to scopes of work, in preconstruction? The answer to that is absolutely yes. So products sync up, regions do not. So if you have products set up, they do sync up to scopes of work. Alright. Are there any other questions in some of my vendor contacts in relation heavy bid, or do we wanna move on to the next item here? Do these contacts also integrate to the word bid proposal feature? Yes. They do. So if I have vendors in word bid proposal or customized bid proposal, that vendor is pulling from contact management. Alright. Moving on to the next, next item that we're gonna discuss, and that is alternate quantities. So one of the things that came up as a request at UGM twenty twenty three was the ability to put in alternate quantities in my estimate. So why is that important? Well, my owner or the owner of the project might wanna see something in one quantity, but I wanna track it in a separate in a different quantity here. So in essence, we want to be able to run, run information based on multiple, different quantities. So I went ahead and I added one here. So under bulk excavation, we're running everything based on cubic yards. We're excavating cubic yards. But for whatever reason, if I wanna track something as square yards, I can go ahead and do that. Basically, under the miscellaneous tab of my activity information, I have the ability to put in alternate quantity and alternate unit. What that's gonna do is, several things, actually. The first one it's gonna do is it's gonna give me an alternate unit cost. So I have my main unit cost of a dollar fifty six per unit or per cubic yard of bulk excavation. I'm also going to now have an alternate unit cost based on my alternate quantity. It's gonna essentially take my total cost divided by my new quantity to give me an alternate unit cost. I also have the ability, for any eagle eye viewers here, to run my activity productivity information based on that alternate quantity. So if I go down to display options and I take a look at my categories here, you'll see down at the bottom of that list, I now have new categories to run based on my alternate quantity. So I can go ahead and I can run my units per hour, man hours per unit, crew dollars per unit, so on and so forth. In this case, I just simply have units per hour based on my alternate quantity, and I can see that now I have my units per hour based on my original quantity, and then I have my units per hour based on my alternate quantity. That is fine, Danny, for having it here in the tree view. The next, two places where this is really handy is in the activity query. I have the ability to see my alternates, alternate quantity, alternate unit, alternate unit cost, and then some of my productivity information. So I can go ahead, and I can bring in my alternate quantity and my alternate unit. I can bring in my alternate unit cost, and we're gonna do man hours per unit. I can then run a a comparison against what it is in my, under my my original quantity. So let's go here. Let's find unit cost, Total unit cost. And I've got manners per unit, quantity, and unit. Okay. I'm gonna remove the item description just for the sake of demonstration here. But now I can go ahead and I can simply dragging drag my columns over to where I want to see them. So if I wanna take a look at my total unit cost compared to my alternate unit cost, I wanna look at my quantity compared to my alternate quantity and my alternate unit compared to my unit. I can basically set all of my columns up to show my comparisons here. So in this case, I just have the one activity set up, but I can basically just run a simple comparison from my activity query to show me all of the differences here. Now just like with anything else with my activity query, I can right click. I can dump this out to Excel. I can run it as a report. I can also save it as a template and use it later if I choose to if I wanna run, quantity comparisons across the board. Alright. The the next area where this is really important is in the pivot reports. So under the report menu, if we go down to more and we go down to pivot reports, we can also click on any of the report headers and then just go straight down to the bottom. If I run my pivot report here, which I think I actually clicked it twice by accident. Yep. Opened up twice. I'm gonna go ahead and close one of them. But if I go to my activities tab here, under my activity information, I can see my alternate alternates throughout here. So under I've got my alternate quantity. I've got my alternate unit. I've got different productivity information. Let's go ahead. Let's expand that out. But you'll see here, I've got units per crew hour, units per man hour, units per shift, all based on my alternates. So I've got different information here, all based on on alternate. So in this case, I've got my alternate unit cost. So if I wanted to see the differences in a comparison, not just in my activity query, I can do the same thing here in my, in my estimate or in my in my pivot report. I apologize. If I wanted to see my units per crew hour here, I can basically just run a real quick comparison here. So my units per crew hour based on my original quantity and based on my alternate quantity. So in this case, I've only got really one here, which is just that, first activity in bid on twenty. So I'll see a a real difference here. But, otherwise, it'll essentially print this, print the same information. Any questions on alternate quantities before we before we move on to the next item? K. So the next item we're gonna take a look at here, and I'm gonna jump back to the to the presentation here. We're gonna take a look at the cost and price report plus. So we actually made two changes to the cost and price report plus, and I felt and I felt this was a talking point in this webinar because a lot of customers use this report. So one thing that was reported by users is in the indirect charges section of heavy bed twenty twenty three dot two and prior, the indirect charges do not actually display any miscellaneous cost types that you have defined in your estimate. It just cuts them off, and it lumps them all into construction it lumps all the cost into construction material, I believe. So that doesn't necessarily give you an accurate representation of what's in your bid. So we made an adjustment to to show that, and I'm gonna jump over, back to heavy bid here. And I'm gonna run my cost and price report. And we're gonna look at sorry. Wrong one. And this is only for the cost and price report plus, not the cost and price report, classic information here. So we're gonna go ahead. We're gonna run that. And we just gave a little prelude to something that's in the future and that we're gonna talk about here in a moment. But if we jump down to my indirect charges, you'll see here that I now have my miscellaneous cost information showing here. So we just give you that more granular level of detail. Amanda, go ahead. Once again, the window doesn't move with you, so you gotta change your sharing. Oh, it did. Oh, it doesn't say that you know what? We're gonna do okay. Okay. Can you see it now? Yep. You're good. Okay. So down here in the indirect charges, you'll see that my trucking costs are now broken out into their own category, and I also have my categories for miscellaneous two and miscellaneous three. If I had defined those categories, they would show whenever I define them as. We just give you that, little bit more granular level of detail. The other item that we fixed, was something that was reported by users as well, was how we handle subtotals in the cost and price report plus. So one of the bugs that we had was if you had a subtotal that was running on any of your direct costs, the totals for that subtotal were contributing to the direct totals of your estimate. Now that didn't affect anything actually in the bid, but it gave you incorrect information in the report. So we fixed that, and now the direct totals are going to read correctly if you're using subtotals in your estimate. Alright. Let's jump back to heavy bid here. Alright. So the next item that we're gonna take a look at here is off shift hours. So what are off shift hours? Off shift hours are something that are that are pertinent to customers using burden tables in heavy bid. So if you have burden tables set up in heavy bid, under your calendar setup, you have this nifty new little feature that's called off shift. So why is off shift important? Well, we give you the ability to run three shifts, and those three shifts typically run on a twenty four hour rotating calendar. So eight eight and eight would be twenty four hours. So I could run, what is it, twelve to eight, eight to four, and then four to twelve. However, I might have another shift in there that could be twelve to eight. That functionality works just fine. However, that off shift was not counting, towards estimated days. So we made a we made a simple change in heavy bed to take the off shift hours and count them towards estimated days. So I created an activity here, with some with some really, round numbers. Long story short, just an activity with a million square feet, and I did thirty two hundred crew hours, that will essentially round it up to one hundred days. If I did not take that into account, because now I've got four eight hour shifts totaling up to thirty two hours in any one given day, if I wasn't taking that into account, it would have, essentially run the numbers as if I was utilizing twenty four hundred, crew hours instead of thirty two hundred, adjusting my my day's duration or my my estimated total days for this activity. This gives you a much more accurate representation of your estimated days on your on your estimate. Now walking right into the next item here, you'll notice I created an more or less absurdly long activity description, talking about off shift demonstration and a demonstration of schedule code length shown to be one hundred characters long. Now why did I do that? Well, in our scheduling subsystems, whether we were utilizing, whether we were utilizing the heavy bid scheduling, we were utilizing, Microsoft Project or Microsoft Primavera p six, we trimmed the description to thirty characters. And why did we do that? Well, many, many, many years ago, we had an activity description length, limitation of fifty characters, and I think don't quote me on this, but I think p six had a limitation of thirty characters. So we trimmed to the lowest common denominator, which was thirty characters. However, over the last several years, those description links have expanded. For heavy bid, the activity length, description length is one hundred characters. For p six, I believe it is a hundred and twenty characters. For project, I believe it is two hundred and fifty six characters. So now heavy bid is the the lowest common denominator for activity description length. So we opened up the description length to as many characters as we allow so that whatever description you have in heavy bid will get transferred over to Microsoft Project or, Oracle Primavera p six. There's no no setup you need to do. It just, it just expands it. Any questions on that? Alright. The the next item we're gonna take a look at is, we're gonna take a look at the audit trail. So this is something that was actually brought up to us by a customer. And one of the things that comes up and let's bring up the audit trail here. One of the things that comes up is this time stamp. Now if you're running a standalone, this isn't a big deal. It's just gonna show you whatever time you're currently running it. However, if you've got a bid that you've got users on the East Coast and the West Coast or anywhere in between, long story short, they're operating in different time zones, this list can show up out of order simply because the times don't match. So what we did in the background was we, we actually adjusted the date time to read based on the the UTC time or the the universal time. So what that means is it's running on the UTC time, and then it's converting it to whatever your local regional settings are. So you'll see here, I made some changes at eleven forty five AM, and that's based on Central Standard Time. However, I'm going to show my full screen here just for a minute. And if I go down and change my date and time settings here, and I'm gonna change them to we'll change them to eastern time. I'm gonna go ahead and close. You'll see here my time jumped ahead an hour. I can go ahead. I'm gonna refresh my screen, and you'll see here my time jumped. It went ahead, and it it jumped ahead to twelve forty five. I can go back. I can reset that because that's gonna throw me off if I don't change it back. I can refresh, and it's gonna change it back to twelve forty or eleven forty five. So it's always going to display based on whatever your local time settings are. But in the background, it's recording the event based on whatever whatever you have set as, I'm sorry, whatever it is in the universal time. So change that back here. Alright. Any questions on that? Alright. The last item I wanna talk about today is in bid pricing. So prior to heavy bid twenty twenty four, if for any reason you had a bid item that ran on a negative takeoff quantity and you made an adjustment, doesn't matter how big or how small of an adjustment, and I tried to restore it back to a balanced bid, it wouldn't do it. I had to go back and I had to manually make that change. Well, not only is that something where somebody could miss not having that change made if they didn't come over and look at the status, it's also just an extra step during bid closing that you shouldn't have to take. So in this regard, we just simply fix that for you. So now if I go in and I can restore my item back to a balanced bid, HeavyBid is going to restore that back for me. And that's, no different than if I come down here to options and I restore everything to a balanced bid as well. So whether it's individual or for the entire entire estimate. Alright? Any questions on that? Alright. With that being said, that those were my talking points for for today's webinar. Does anyone have any any general questions? In case anyone was not familiar or unaware, HeavyBid twenty twenty four is live on the community. It is open to download today. So if you have not already updated to HeavyBid twenty twenty four, you can go to the community, download the update, and begin that process, now if you choose to. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna hang back for a minute, see if any any questions come up. But if there aren't any other questions, I'll let everybody I'll let everybody drop off. You guys have a good rest of the day. And, again, my email is aaron, a a r o n, dot allshaus, a l l s h o u s e, at h c s s dot com if you have any questions. Yep. As Amanda sent out to everyone, that is my email, aaron dot allshaus at h c s s dot com. Oh, boy. Yeah. Let's not let's not give the cell number out just yet. But email, absolutely. Alright. I'm not seeing any questions come in, so I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna stop sharing, and I'm gonna let everybody go. If you have anything else, again, don't hesitate to to shoot me an email. I'm happy to follow-up with any questions you might have. But, otherwise, have a great rest of the day, and have a great weekend if I don't hear from you before that.