During the slower economic times of 2009-2011, New Jersey-based contractor RE Pierson focused on creating more estimating efficiency so that, when the market picked up, their estimators could produce more bids without increasing
their staff.
Chief Estimator John Sloat worked on creating well-structured, organized codebooks that would begin automating the work of building the estimate. Sloat started by adding common activities that had been used in the past. For each activity he put in the typical unit of measure, the typical crew, the average production rate, and any materials that usually went with that crew.
Now, any time he looks up and uses one of those codes in an estimate, HeavyBid pulls in his crew, any materials, and uses the production to compute the crew hours. Sloat only has to modify the production rate, or possibly the crew itself, for whatever is unusual about that job. Because HeavyBid marks items that are pulled in as changed, Sloat can have less-experienced estimators assemble the bid, and he can just review or change the production rates.
Over the three-year period of 2012-2014, Pierson doubled the bid volume of 2006-2008 with the same number of estimators by using this feature.
Do you want to focus on improving your estimating efficiency in 2017? Send your estimators to the 2017 Users’ Group Meeting in January or February to learn best practices for creating and organizing codebooks, as well as many other techniques to reduce the time it takes to prepare estimates.
