HeavyBid Monthly Webinar June 2024

Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. Give me just a second. We're getting everything finalized here before we jump in. Alright. I think we have everything set up. My name is Paul Lambert. I'm the technical product manager for, heavy bid preconstruction. With me here, I have Aaron. He is going to be helping with any questions, and any other comments that you guys have, making sure that we get those answered, and also helping with, heavy bid expertise in case any questions about that come up. Today, we're going to be focusing on what's new in precon. So this is, what's been developed this year in twenty twenty four in precon. We have a list here. If we switch over, the four main categories that we're going to be looking at are reporting, contacts and companies, project admin, and data entry. And we'll have some time at the end to answer any questions. If you do have questions while we're working on this, by all means, feel free to put them in the chat, and we will get them answered that way for you. Before we jump into actually what's new here, I wanted to remind you all, if you go to road maps dot h t s s apps dot com, this is where you can see what's new without having to wait for a webinar. So up at the top, we have heavy bid desktop. And if you click on this bar to minimize it, it will show you heavy bid preconstruction as well. And you can click subscribe here as well, and that will send you an email anytime that there are new updates so that you're always up to date with the latest features that are coming out. With that being said, we're going to be switching back and forth a decent amount between the agenda here and actual live demos. So let's jump into it. There were several things that we did on reporting for upgrades this year. The first one is releasing scheduled reports. Let me switch over to the live demo here. So for scheduled reports, this is a way for you to send an email to, people in your organization with a list of projects. So here inside, Precon, this is the standard view up at the top. Right now, we can see the template that we're on is annual project review. I can switch between different templates here. And we have all the different projects for this particular, template that we have set up. So we can see in each of these, I have it currently set up by year, and within each year, by the project status, and within each status, by the type of work. So this is one example. Another example might be I just have it filtered down to only show a particular estimator so that an estimator is able to see all the projects that they're working on or that they're assigned to at any point in time. If I have somebody that needs information from precon, but maybe they don't need to go in and edit information or they don't wanna have to open up precon each time, the scheduled reports is a way to address that. So inside project tracking, if I go to customize setup and I go to subscription setup, it's going to bring us to the subscription page. You can see right now, we have two different subscriptions that are already set up in here, but we'll go ahead and create a new one. So first thing we're going to do is name this. I suggest naming it based on what, what the content of this is going to be. So for instance, I might have, estimator list as to if I can spell. And these will be all of the, estimates for the estimator named Paul. Next, I can put in a subs or a description here. So I might do all active estimates slash projects for Paul, and I'm going to put in an email subject. The subject is going to be what's on the email that is actually sent to whoever I choose in just a moment. So, we're actually just going to copy the description because I'm okay with that being the subject of the email. Next, we're going to choose the project template that's going to be used here. So when we were looking just a moment ago, we saw we were on annual business review. I'm going to go through, and in this case, that's actually what I'm going to reuse here, but we have other options. So if I have, a project template that's specific to just the estimates for Paul, I could put that in here. If I want a template that is all active projects, everything with a a status of active, I could use that instead. But I'm going to choose one of my project templates here. Next, I'm going to choose who is going to receive this email. So I can put it in here, and I'm going to choose from this list. An important note here is the recipients that you can choose from are the people that have credentials accounts. So I cannot send this to some random personal email. I can only send this to emails that are registered in credentials for HCSS. If I have a lot of people that I need to put in, I can bulk edit recipients, and I can just start putting them in here. And I'm going to just put a comma between each one. So next I could do like that and put in Aaron's email. And I can copy and paste a list from somewhere into here, or I can type them in manually, whatever works. And you can see now I actually added myself twice, but we have the different people on this list. So this means when I send this out, it's going to send to both Paul and Aaron. And what it's going to send is the contents of the annual project review project template. The final thing that I have to choose is when do I want this sent. So right now, you can see by default, it's sent every Monday morning at seven AM, central time, Chicago. For me personally, I want this email to be sent every weekday. So I'm just going to set it to go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and I want it to be in the office when I get here at eight thirty AM, central time. Now that I have all the pieces in, I can press save. And now every weekday at eight thirty AM, it's going to send an email. And let me show you what, that email looks like. Just a quick example of it. So this is an example of what it might look like. You can see up at the top, we have our logo, which we'll talk about in just a minute. This one is for the basic project list template, but it works the same way. And it just has the contents of the template that I chose. And we can see that is the same as if I go back here and switch this to the basic project list. It's the same information that I have here. So I chose this template to be emailed out, and that's what's showing in the email that's being sent to me. So that covers the first part. Let's hop back in. The two other things that I wanted to touch on here. First is bulk edit recipients. So this is what we looked at just a moment ago. Switch back over to here. If I'm in an enterprise company, something where maybe I'm trying to send out this email to fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty people, it can get a little bit annoying to have to type each email in here, and then copy and paste that over between different business units. So with this bulk edit recipients and copy recipients, I can copy it from one business unit, switch over to my next one, and then just bulk edit, paste those in, and save it. A quick reminder, this is, specific to each business unit. So right now, we're in the manager business unit. I'm setting it up in here. The other business units do not have this. I would need to set up this one in those units as well. The last thing on here that we introduced fairly recently was the ability to change what logo is used. So you saw earlier that we have the custom logo at the top. Previously, this was just an HCSS logo. We got some feedback from different customers that that could be a little bit confusing for some of the people that are receiving this email that don't necessarily use precon very often. So they were getting an email from HCSS, and they went, I'd this this looks like spam, or this looks a little bit fishy, something like that. So we introduced the ability to include your own logo. If you click on this gear icon up in the top right, click click on company profile, This is where you can click and choose the logo that you want to include instead, and it'll just pull up a list for you to be able to, pick the file from. Once you've done that, it will start sending that out instead on all of your scheduled reports. Let's go ahead and swap back over. Next in reporting is choosing which PDF sections to print. So if we go into one of these, let me switch back actually to this one. Previously, when you clicked download PDF, it would just download the entire the entire page here, the entire, project, all the information from it. However, some sections are more relevant to certain people than others. So for instance, if I'm sending information to, the bonding company, I may not want to include some of the information that I have in my project here. If I'm sending it to my project owner, I might not want to include information from the estimate quite yet. Maybe we haven't hit that step, or the bid results or something like that. So we've introduced the ability to choose which sections. If I click in this, three dot menu in the top right and I click download PDF, you'll see now it brings us to this section here that says, which of these would you like to include in the PDF? So maybe for this particular one, I don't want to include the heavy bid estimate or the bid results. I just want the normal details, any documentation, and the key dates. When I click download PDF, it's going to take just a minute. And now we'll see it has project details, it has documentation, and it has key dates, but it did not include any other information. Even though in this project, I also have heavy bid estimate. I also have, bid results. I have a couple of other sections here. This just gives you a little bit more control over what information you're sharing when you're reporting on your projects. The final one on this list is the link to heavy job. And this is something that we introduced, I believe, shortly before UGM in the beginning of February. You can see over on this right hand side, we have job budget progress. This is a way for you to link a job from heavy job with a project from precon. You can see by default, it'll have no job linked. But if I click link job, it's going to give me a list of every job that my credentials account has a right to see. So if I have permission to see it inside heavy job Oh, perfect. Okay. In a sec. Thank you. So this is everything that my account is able to see from heavy job. I'm going to go ahead and click on this and click link, and it will populate the information here. Once this is linked, everybody that has permission to see this precon project will be able to see this information. So here, we have the total down at the bottom for each of these for budgeted, expected, actual, and for variance. And then we have it broken down by line item as well. If I put in the wrong one or if I actually don't want this to show, I can click that three dot menu and either change to a different job or just unlink the job entirely. We got a question here from Bob. He He said my subscription preview has different formatting from the sent email. Specifically, the lines alternate between gray and white on preview and do not on email subscription. Can these be made to match? Let me check real quick. You're seeing the the different rows have different, highlighting. Yeah. Bob, let me check on that and get back to you after the webinar for it. I'll reach out to you. Any other questions on reporting before we move on to contacts and companies? We'll give people a couple more seconds in case they're typing. Alright. Looking at contacts and companies. This is something that we have been adding small features for and, plan on continuing to improve. But three major ones that we added are, the ability to add a contact sort of on the fly, the ability to export contacts, and to import address. So let's look at each of those. First, adding a contact within a project. So previously, if I was on this project here, and for point of contact, I wanted to add in a specific person, I would have to go back over on this left hand side to contact management. I would have to go into the company that I wanted, and I would add a person here. Put in all the information that I need, go back to the project that I was on, and choose the person. That's a lot of extra steps when all I wanted to do was add a person here in the first place. So now we've added the ability to add a new contact to contact management from directly inside the project. So here, I click on add a new contact. I choose which company they're going to be a part of, put in the name, any other relevant information that I want, and click add. It'll automatically choose that person for me. And now I didn't have to go all the way over to contact management. I just put them directly in. We have one from Evan. Is or will there be the ability to format the reports such as column width and font? Currently, this is set to just show a table the same as you see, by default in the project list. We are working on improvements to this, as well as the ability to do things like have a PDF emailed to you instead of a table directly in the the email. So we are working on improvements for it. I don't think we have anything specifically right now on formatting things like the font or the column width, but we are working on general improvements to the scheduled reports for that. One from Nathaniel as well. Can you link contacts from preconstruction to heavy bid? Yes. You definitely can. On the latest version, we put out a, an initiative to link your system vendors in heavy bid with contact management in preconstruction. There are a couple steps in there and a couple things that have to be checked. So if that's something that you want to do, reach out to support at h d s s dot com, and they can walk you through the process and make sure that everything is set up correctly so that that works well together. But, yes, those are able to be linked together. The next one on here is the ability to export contacts. So for a while, we've had the ability to export several different things, project list, for example. But while you could import contacts, you could not export contacts. We want this list to be able to, be usable in different formats. We know that different people use, different programs for source of data on some of their contacts. People use Outlook. People use different CRMs. That sort of thing. So, obviously, we want to be able to receive information from there. But especially trying to get contacts from one business unit to another was a little bit hard to do before. So now we've added the ability through this three dot menu in the top right to export to a CSV or export to Excel. That way you can take this information out of this business unit, put it into another one. Or if you need to do data cleanup of some sort, you can export it into one of these formats and, do the data cleanup and do whatever you need to from there. The last one is the ability to import an address when, importing companies. So through this import contact section. Previously, there was not a place for you to be able to add information about where they are. We had the name, website, first name, last name, that sort of stuff. But there wasn't a way to say which office they were a part of. We've added in, information for this. So in each of these, it tells you what's needed, the state or providence sorry, providence, and things like address, city, ZIP code, all that. So this just gives you a little bit more flexibility over the information that you're adding if you're doing it through the import. If you're doing it through the company list and adding it manually, it works the same as before. This is just if you're bulk importing. It gives you a little bit more flexibility with that. Any other questions on contacts or companies? Evan asked, will additional fields be added from heavy bid vendor business contacts to contact management in the future? I would have to see which ones you are interested in. I believe right now we have it set up to, handle most of the ones that we plan on handling. I know there are some differences between, heavy bids such as regions, as compared to the contact manager management module. But I believe right now, there are not any specific plans to add additional heavy bid vendor, fields. Aaron, can you confirm? Right now, there are no additional plans to import, additional additional fields. The follow-up question, we have the ability to import, the minority information, but, things like regions, we are gonna be replacing that in the future with a with a location based information that will then funnel back down into heavy bid. But most everything that we believe should be there is already there. So if there's something specific that we are currently missing, please let me know, and we'll take a look at it. Brian, I'll follow-up with you offline on this one. Awesome. Next on the list, we've had a slew of different project admin type things. The top four that we have here are, bulk actions, duplicating a project, precon ID, and default values. So let's go through those in order. One of the issues that a lot of our larger companies had were that you can import a ton of company or sorry, a ton of projects at once. I can create three hundred companies through an import. But if I wanted to delete a project, I would have to go in one by one and delete them individually. I would have to go into the project itself, three dot menu, and click delete project. When I'm having to do that, even ten times starts getting annoying. But when you're looking at several hundred times, that's that's not a realistic way to do that. So we've added in the ability to bulk delete. When you're in your project list, in the top right corner with these three dots, we can go to show bulk operations. Here, we can just click on all of the projects that we want to delete. Or if I have all the projects in a specific template, I can use this button here, and you'll see it automatically, checks all of them. Or, sorry, all the ones showing. And then we click delete projects, and it will delete them all. It does give a confirmation mess message, but I don't really wanna delete these projects, so I'm not going to do that right now. Uncheck those. So now you can import a bunch of different projects. And if you get the wrong ones, not a problem. You can just bulk delete the ones that you're trying to get rid of. This is also very useful. I know several of our customers have projects that they no longer need that were either test projects or, made an error or duplicates or something like that, that they have named as such. But, again, when you have several hundred of these, it can be a bit of a pain to delete one by one. So this gives them the ability to clean those projects up so that they're not showing anywhere in the data that they're trying to report on. Next is the ability to duplicate a project. So if I go into any project that I have, in the top right corner, the three dots again, we have the ability to duplicate a project. What this is going to do is create a new project, and everything except the project name is going to be filled in for you. So you can see we have project number. We have the project status. All of this information is the same as the one that I just put pressed duplicate from. All I have to do is add in a project name and save it. Let's actually do that. And now the project is ready. This is obviously useful if you already have, the if you already have a project that does need to be duplicated that's mostly done. Maybe it's a substantially similar project. One of the other use cases that this is, very helpful for is creating a template. So if I have maybe three or four different kinds of work that I do that are going to have a lot of very similar information, such as, making sure that the the project status is starting at a certain value, they have a similar owner or something like that, and making sure that they have the same documents. All of this, I can save a template that has just the pieces missing that are going to change from project to project, and I can duplicate that template, fill in the missing information, and save that. And the next time, I can, again, duplicate that template, fill in the new missing information, save that, and so on. Bob asked, do all users have access to bulk delete? Every user who has the add slash edit permission has access to this. So under user admin here, if we look at myself, we can see under project tracking, add and edit. This is checked, in this case, because I'm an admin. But if they have this checked, they have the ability to bulk delete just like they have the ability to delete individual projects. Sort of in line with this duplicated project, in order to make project entry as easy as possible, we've added in default values. Is it possible to restore the deleted project? We do not guarantee the ability to restore a deleted project. If you have deleted a project and it was an accident, you can reach out to our support team, and they can see if it's possible to, essentially roll you back to the previous state where that project wasn't deleted. Obviously, be very careful when you are deleting projects, especially bulk deleting. Actually, let me show you what it looks like real quick, what that that message that I was talking about because it helps a little bit with this. So here, let's say that I clicked all of these. My computer's running a little bit slow. And let's say I only meant to to get three of these. I accidentally clicked four. I I was talking with a coworker or, you know, my mouse stuttered, something like that. I clicked on four when I meant to click on three. When I click this delete button, it's going to say, are you sure you wanna delete all four? So this is a very useful way if you know how many you're supposed to be deleting to make sure that the number that you think and the number that shows here are the same number. If you do delete it by accident, again, reach out to support and see. They might be able to help you depending on the situation. But always be very careful whenever you're deleting projects, whether it's one at a time or multiple. So for default values, under the customized setup tab in project, tracking, under projects, we're going to go into the spot where we customize each of the different fields. One of the most common use cases for this is likely going to be project status. So I know that anytime I create a new project, like, ninety five percent of the time, I want that to be a specific status. I want it to start as, perspective work. I can change it later to one of the others, but ninety five percent of the time, if I'm adding a project, it's gonna be perspective work. So rather than having to click this every time, I can now click use default value, this little checkbox right here. And I can tell it I want my default value to be perspective work. What this means is anytime that I click add project, whenever it is created, you'll see the, the project status automatically filled in perspective work. And I can do this for as many fields as I want. So for now, it's just this one, but I could say, you know, I only do work for TxDOT. So every time I want the owner to default to TxDOT or every time I want, my estimator to default to whoever my lead estimator is. So any of these that I know is going to be the same thing pretty much every time, I can just set the default value to be that. Now, again, this doesn't mean that it has to be this. If I create new project and the default is perspective work, but I know we already want this. I just I forgot to put it in pre con earlier. I can switch this over to estimating right now and put in whatever name and save. And when I save that, it's going to have it in estimating. This is just a shortcut so that most of the time, unless I change it, it will be whatever that default value is. Save me a little bit of time on data entry. This will also apply for anytime that I'm importing projects. So if I'm using an Excel sheet, if I have a column that I leave blank so say I'm importing a project like this, I I fill in my project name on the Excel file, precon ID, project number. If I leave project status blank and I do the import, it will default to whatever I have my default value set to, in this case, perspective work. Just something to keep in mind there. Oops. So we can see the default value on a lot of different things here. We can set it in for owners or for, currency types. We can set it in for, companies. Like I said, this, we can default value that to be TxDOT or whoever the the work is that I normally do for. Anything like that, we can set up those default values. The last one on this list is the precon ID reservation. This is more a small improvement than a new feature, in terms of how most people are going to be using it. But this specifically relates to the precon ID, if you have that enabled, that shows right here. So this, by default, is going to try and take the next available number. If I were to create a new project after I created this one, it would try and end in zero zero five nine. That's the number that it would pick for me. There were some issues where if you had two people that clicked add new project at the same time, it would put both of them as zero zero five nine. And so the first person would save, and it would go, great. Not a problem. The second person would save, and it would say, hey. Zero zero five nine is already taken. And that person would then have to basically guess and check until they got an open pre con ID. This new system just means that you don't have to guess. It'll make sure that you have one person get zero zero five nine and the next person zero zero six zero. So just a small improvement if you have multiple people working in the system and entering projects at the same time. Makes it a little bit easier for them. Any other questions on, project administration? Alright. Our last section here is data entry. This sort of falls under project administration too. I'm not sure if it counts as its own or not, so maybe this is just a continued project admin. But the first one is the ability to update a contact on all projects. So, when you add a contact to a project, it takes a snapshot of what that contact looks like. So in this case, we've added in Gilberto Lambert, and here's the phone number for this make believe person. If I then go into contact management and I change Gilberto's phone number and I save that, I go back into my project list, go back in here, he's still going to have the old phone number, and that's on purpose. We wanted to make sure that if you're putting information about a company that you were working with, whether that's a bonding company, whether that's your project owner, specific points of contact, like who did you talk to. All of this information, we wanted to save it, so that it is accurate as to the time that you interacted with them. However, if you enter in a contact and you add a bunch you add this contact all over the place, to a whole bunch of new projects, and then you realize that, oops, I actually had a typo in that phone number. I don't wanna go back and individually update each of these projects by deselecting this person and selecting them with the new information. I want to update this contact across every single project that they are on. We've added in the ability to do this. So if you go into contact management, choose the company of the person, and choose the person themselves. When you click on this manage button and go down to sync, what this is going to do is update the information on every single project that this person, in this case, me, is on. It will update that information to the current information that you see on the screen behind it right here. This doesn't let you pick and choose. So you're either leaving all of them as historically accurate, and you can update one at a time if you need to change that, or you can change every single one. But if I have three hundred projects and I wanna update two hundred and ninety nine of them, this is gonna update all three hundred. We do not expect people to be using this feature super often. This is really just if I made a typo at one point and, I need to adjust that on all of them. But it's very important to keep in mind this will remove the historical accuracy of that contact on that project and update it to the more current version. So if you need this, very useful, but be careful when using this. Next on the list is the ability to geolocate a location from string. That sounds very technical. But what this means is you don't have to use latitude and longitude anymore for location. So previously, if I wanted to add a location, say, to a project here, I would have to either go find it on the map and say it's right here. And here it gives me the coordinates, and I would use these coordinates in the job site. Or I would go to something like Google Maps, find the location, copy the coordinates, and use those. What we've now included is the ability to understand where something is by typing it in here. So if we do What's a good example? We'll do West Air airport. Here. We can do this on Kansas. So now instead of having to enter in these individual coordinates, I can just type in the name, and it'll pop up. If I wanted to do a specific address, I can do that, instead of just the street itself. If I wanted to do, like, the corner, an intersection of two streets, I can just type in what I want here, choose it from that drop down list that we saw a second ago. Let me get rid of this again to show you. Choose it from this drop down list, and it will find it on the map for me and auto populate the, coordinates right here. The other thing that I can do with this is keep the same coordinates. So I want exactly this point or even here. I want this corner right here. But I want to say something different. I want this to say, like, corner of the sidewalks. Now instead of clicking on one of these options, I can click out of here. And when I save this, it's going to keep this coordinate on the map so that the map is accurate, but it's going to show, the text here so that when other people are looking at this project, they understand what this coordinate represents, especially if this is, like, in the middle of a field. You can say who owns the property or, you know, seven minutes up up the road from somewhere. You can put in whatever you want here. So this gives you a little bit more, detailed view or a a detailed way of explaining where a project is outside of just using the coordinate system. The last one on the list here is the percentage field. This is something that we just released in the past couple of weeks. If we go into customize setup again and we add in a number field, we now have an extra option. So I can either format this as a number. Let's put in rate, for instance. I can either format this as a number or as a percentage. So let's, first show you what it looks like as a number if I save. We're just going to use ten in this case. And save. Forgot a project name. Sorry. One sec. Here we go. So this is what we're used to. This is just the ten with rate because that's exactly what we typed in. If we change this over to customize setup again and change this number field to a percentage field, and we go back to our example six, and scroll down, I can put this in as a percentage instead. Now the way this works on the back end is it considers everything, with the decimal point kind of where you would put it. So point one is equal to ten. So because I put in ten, it adds two decimal places to turn it into a percent, and that's why it's showing one thousand. If I wanted ten percent instead, I would put ten, and now it's ten point zero zero. I can save, and it's going to show as the percent. So now instead of having to put rate parenthesis percent to let everybody know it's a percent, they can already tell because it's it automatically shows it as part of the number. If I were to change this ten back to a number for some reason, it would be a point one. So the the math is still the same. The only difference is it's a lot easier to tell what's a percent and what's not. And if I go back here and change to add a column, and scroll over, you can see it shows that percent on the end of there as well. So this is very helpful if you're trying to calculate something like profit, if you're trying to show a completion percentage, something like that. It's now showing us ten percent, and it will show that everywhere. So, obviously, inside project details like we just saw, inside project list like we see right here. And when you print that on a PDF, from inside the project itself, it's going to show there as well. Now it shows that ten percent on rate. So just a little quality of life to make it a little bit easier. We know a lot of people use percentages in a lot of the, information that they're tracking inside a project. So now it is a little bit more obvious, what is supposed to be a percent and a little bit cleaner when you're printing out these reports. That's everything that we had for the major things that are new this year so far. We are in June right now, so it's just been the past five or six months. Do we have any other questions? I don't know that I missed any here, but if anybody has oh, Bob just put one in. If anybody else has any questions, feel free to drop them in while we're looking at this stuff. Bob said different topic. Can you set different levels of required fields per status? For instance, perspective work requires bid number, and once it becomes an in progress bid, the bid date becomes required. This is a request that we've gotten from several different customers, and is something that we are kind of in the research phase of figuring out what that might look like. There it it gets very complicated very quickly to make sure that everybody's able to, do this, like, conditional formatting saying that if I do if I have it this way, I want all of this to show. If I change it to this, I want this to show. Especially if you're doing things like, changing it based on status and estimator or status and bid date. Like, saying if it's within seven days of the bid date and the status is this. It gets very complicated to figure out how all of that should flow in a way that's easy to understand for, the administrators who are setting this up and in a way that works very consistently so that it happens the way you want it to every time. So this is something that we've gotten a request for before, and something that we're kinda researching what that might look like if we were to put it in. But we we don't expect this, for instance, in the next, like, two months. But the like I said, it is something that we're looking at. That's a good question. We'll get about thirty more seconds here. And if not, then, if if we've answered everybody's questions, then we'll give everybody fifteen minutes back or so. Alright. If you think of any questions after the webinar, feel free to reach out to myself for anything precon related or to Aaron for anything heavy bid related, or we can direct you to the right person if you're not quite sure who it's supposed to go to, and we'll get back to you on it. Mine is paul dot lambert at hcss dot com. I forgot to put it in this slide, but I will drop it into the chat here real quick so everybody can see. There we go. So you can copy and paste that. If you think of anything, if you have feedback that you wanna share, or if you have questions that you want answered, feel free to email me anytime, and, we can start a conversation about it. Thank you all for coming out here, and we will see you in next month's webinar.