Russell1200

When you go for training you need to have worked through whatever tutorials, etc. they give you and be halfway conversant with basics. Otherwise you are trying to learn to much too quickly.

I am taking Accubid training. But I went through the tutorial and did some practice with and without their live count before hand. That way I could focus on what (for me) wound up being the trickier issues.

Having someone walk you through even a small estimate will help a lot. I would take the Chief up on his very generous offer.

SoSpec

I have been using ACCUBID for many years and with my previous knowledge of other systems, I am "self taught". I occasionally get correspondence from Accubid about classes they are having when they come to Atlanta, but who can afford $2695 for a class.

Russell1200

$2695? I wonder which class it is. I have two series of classes and they don't cost that much.

If you have been using them that long, I suspect the standard classes would not have enough information to be of use to you.

I am not sure what they do with the more advanced users. The online training is one on one, so obviously there is a lot of flexibility: they can spend time on the areas you are having issues with.

SoSpec

This was for a class in Atlanta, not a one on one.

BDB

Chief, thanks for the offer, It may be a day or 2 before I can give ya a call, do I just ask for chief? So did you go to a training class? How long did t take you to get comfortable with it?

__________________
Proud Father of a US Army Solider

chiefestimator

I got comfortable with the program in about 4 hours. I am however, at one with the machine. I have been using computers since before the Apple II.

I can teach you the concepts of using the program in about an hour. After that, as with every program out there, you have to get familiar with the data base. Where is the 3/4" pvc coated lb? I will give you a quick run thru the libraries that come with the program.

Depending on the size and types of projects you bid, it will take you 4 to 10 estimates to be comfortable with the program.

SoSpec

Back in the 80's I used a program from MC2 that ran on an IBM mainframe computer. Once you had all of your data in, you pushed a "calculate" button and you could leave for the rest of the day. A $6,000,000 project I did took the computer 8 hours to calculate. New systems calculate as you go, but you will notice everytime you enter something you will get a slight little hesitation as it does the calculation. I am presently doing a project that has 32 different breakdowns, as you enter more and more data that hesitation becomes greater. I am using ACCUBID, do you users of ConEst see the same hesitation? Of course the end product is well worth the small inconvenience. I could break the job down into a series of smaller jobs on different estimates, but I like to keep the job as one, just using different areas and bid items.

chiefestimator

Hey SoSpec - I didn't think there were any estimators left that were old enough to have used a mainframe. I never used one directly. My very first estimating gig was with a company that connected to a mainfraime thru a teletype using the Estimation system. We had to put a 10 didgit code on each takeoff item. The receptionist would type it into the teletype, creating a punch tape. The punch tape would then be fed into the machine and sent to Denver, Depending on the priority we assigned, we would get the estimate back in 2 to 24 hours.

In regards to your speed question, we get the slight hestitation upon each entry, but it does not get longer. It is always a fraction of a second. What does get longer on a large estimate is a recalc, which you generally do just before finalizing a project to make sure you have all the latest prices in your estimate. With ConEst, that time is cut down a significant amount if you have 2GB of memory or more. The most recent very large project was about 700 pages of takeoff, and took about 20 seconds to recalc.

3rdgeneration

Not to get of topic but I have been an estimator for 15 plus years now and I am in a terrible slump in estimating jobs and losing money after the job is done. We use Accubid for our pricing and I am somewhat lukewarm on the whole program. It may be a great program but I really am not sure because I have never used any other program that I can compare it to.

Anyway, lately I have been missing badly on my material totals. The last few jobs we bid and got I was approximately 20-25% to low on my material. The wire pricing was correct but it seems I just don't pick up alot of misc items like reducing washers, unistrut, lug bolts etc.. Granted these items aren't very pricey but we know they do add up. I guess my question is just how in detail do you guys do an estimate?? For example if you are doing a 180,000 sq ft school renovation, do you sit and measure the length of every branch circuit feed to every receptacle and switch ?? Right now I add all my receptacles and switches and figure on average each receptacle will have 25' of c/w feeding it. The same for lights, I do not take time and draw out each homerun or branch circuit that will feed every circuit for every light, I simply just add the total of fixtures and roughly estimate how the Br. circuits will run. In the past when there were numerous jobs being bid I picked up lots of "shortcuts" to estimate jobs and I'm wondering now if these shortcuts are biting me in the butt now.

On average a 100,000 sq ft brand new school takes me around a week to take off and load into Accubid. Does that sound like on average to short of time to do a quality estimate??

On Accubid, again I really don't seem to pick up many material items going back to reducing washers, unistrut etc...for example on a 100,000 sq ft brand new school I will only end up with approx 60-70 different material items when we all know that to do a job that size I should have well over 200 different items figured. I don't know if it's Accubid that isn't giving me the numbers of items I am looking for or if it's user error instead.

I have thrown alot out there for the masses to read, any input is appreciated!!!

dawgs

If you are consistently 20-25% low on your materials you can mark them up at the end of your estimate. Do you use a material pricing service with accu-bid? Do you send your materials for quote sometimes to check your suppliers pricing versus your estimate? You may need to check some of the assemblies and see if they are complete with all the hardware needed to complete the task. By the way I use vision bid manager, so I dont have experience with accu-bid.

chiefestimator

My first thought is what changed? I gather from your statement that only recently did you start losing money on material. Analyze any changes to the way you estimate and price materials.

Second, does your company have a job costing system? Can you compare the quantities in your estimates to the actual materials used? You definitely need to do this before blaming miscellaneous materials.

Third is theft, which is on the rise. I recently worked with an insurance company to determine the amounts of material that should have been used on a project. Somehow, a company allowed over 10,000 feet of #10 MC to be shipped to a project that had less than 1,000 feet on the plans.

Regarding measuring versus averaging branch, I have mixed feelings. I was trained on the west coast, where every project is engineered with the branch conduit shown. We were required to measure every bit of it. As my career progressed, I got involved with large tenant work projects in high rise buildings. Many of these were “unit” priced, requiring an average amount of branch conduit to be included with each outlet. This was good for the tenant work, but it did not work well for other types of projects, such as the schools you mentioned.

After starting an estimating firm, I began to get east coast projects, which are generally not engineered with the branch shown. I wanted some advice on to handle this, so I called George Hauge, the owner of ConEst, who is an east coast trained estimator. His method involved drawing in and measuring the homeruns. The branch for the outlets is then averaged, with the length determined by the layout of the project.

Your miscellaneous material markup is completely dependent on you estimating system’s database. Some databases have very simple assemblies, such as a receptacle with a box, ring, device and plate. Others include much more, such as wirenuts, supports and ground pigtails. In the time before computers, our assemblies were simple, and we used a 5% miscellaneous material markup on commercial projects. Industrial projects will require a larger markup. The database I use now has very extensive assemblies, so we have cut our miscellaneous markup down to 2%.

The time required to estimate a school should average less than 3 hours per electrical plan sheet. This is a little higher than other types of commercial work because the low voltage pages usually have 5 or 6 systems stuffed into them. If it is a large project with over 20 plan sheets, the time per sheet should start going down.

Russell1200

Generally the pricing does not come from the estimating software, but from a pricing service or the material distributor. The default material pricing (at least in the case of Accubid) is high. They presume that if you are using the default pricing you are in the very early stages and still practicing with the program and getting up to speed.

Some materials have climbed back up recently in price. You may want to update your pricing more frequently. I know of one company that stuck with the original pricing from when they first got the program and never changed their pricing -they were McCormick users: but the program makes no difference - within only a couple of years they were getting killed on pricing.

The next thing to look at is cost shifting. A very common problem if project management is a separate function from the estimating side. Go back through the losing project's invoices and see just what exactly was billed to them and see if the sequencing makes sense. If your work load has slowed up a little, what you will see is that a lot of material was bought early in the project that rightfully belonged to an earlier project - but when no work came in behind the current job to continue the cost shifting project, the job began to "fade". Usually this causes a collapse in numbers at the start of a company's revenue downturn.

Theft as mentioned above, theft can be an enormous problem. One person can steel an amazing amount of materials. But people do no suddenly "learn" to steel. With enough data you can usually pin point or narrow down where the loses are coming from.

A second factor would be a change in crew skill level. But 25% is a big number. Usually the differential there is as much (or more) time, rather than the material itself.

Finally, there is no way washers, etc. add up to 25%. It will vary with the program but 2% is a much more reasonable figure. If your "assumptions" worked reasonably well in the past it is not that likely that they would suddenly come up consistently wrong in one direction. The law of compensating errors would pretty much have it falling on both sides of the cost pattern.

So to summarize, your pricing being out of date, is by far the most likely problem that relates to the estimating program. But the pricing itself is not a function of the program, but the input into the program. But once you go through the invoices, and compare pricing to rule that out (or confirm it), I would look elsewhere besides the estimating program.

BDB

This is how I take a job off. I roll every conduit run and circuit, from home runs to to each branch.


This is where I am having trouble with ConEst (and I figure all the systems do this as well). It is set up for this type of takeoff( average) but I had never heard of this method until the guy doing my online training told me about it, I am still not to sure about it. I am trying to figure out how to use Con Est with the way I take a job off (which is rolling off every run and NOT doing average)

__________________
Proud Father of a US Army Solider

The Estimator

The major software companies Accubid, Conest, and Mccormick now have some form of sure count software as an optional upgrade. McCormick uses On Screen Takeoff,
which has been used by general contractors for a long time.and is a finished product not a beta. No program will count every symbol with 100% accuracy. The advantage of these programs is getting the drawings by the internet and doing your takeoff on screen with out the cost of printing the drawings.

SoSpec

I have "played" with Sure Count. Maybe I did not take enough time to learn it or I was just so easily swayed, but my experience was that by the time it took to "set up" the symbols for it to count, I could have finished my takeoff. I now get 90% of the drawings sent to me by my clients by e-mail, can't remember the last time someone actually shipped a set of drawings to me.