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Construction Contractors Hub
913 members • Free
3 contributions to Construction Contractors Hub
14d •Â
T&E vs Lump Sum Estimating
Where in the process do you decide to offer a project as T&E or Lump Sum? What are some factors that influence your decision? And do you use different estimating tools for each?
Jan 24 •Â
Introduce Yourself
I'm keen to hear who everybody is, and what their goals are I assume you already know who I am. But if you don't I'm Tim. I worked for 8 years for big contractors on road, rail, renewable energy projects. I've always worked for head-contractors. I recently worked for some smaller contractors as a consultant when I left my job doing estimating and contract management. It was good, but I found it hard to see a path to scale (other than just starting a contracting business myself) So I instead decided to build software, and found that that's 100x harder than I thought and a very easy way to lose money
2 likes • Feb 6
I'm Adam. I'm a solutions consultant for an automation integrator. Automation in the sense of industrial production facilities. Batch productions of anything from dirt to solvents to pharmaceuticals. My role is to develop solutions, estimates and proposals for complex automation projects.
1 like • Feb 7
@Tim Fairley Yes, we are a discipline within industrial construction projects. Say, Pfizer wants to build a plant to produce a new vaccine. You would have all the standard construction disciplines. Additionally you would have Process Engineers develop P&IDs (Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams), instrument lists, valve lists, etc. for al the piping, tanks, etc that are used to make the vaccine as well as recipes for how it is made. Most of the instruments and valves are designed to be wired to a DCS (Distributed Control System). This is where the automation happens. Our business is taking the process engineering documents, developing a BOM for the DCS such as controllers, input/output cards, and DCS ancillary components such as network switches, operator workstations, etc. We program the automation (recipes) for the valves & motors, as well as custom graphical interfaces for the the operators to run the plant. I was on youtube trying to get some new perspective on our estimating process and stumbled upon your channel which has definitely given me a few new lenses on our process. I have been building out one of my recent estimates in your excel template. I really like how structured and systematic it is. I think there are still a couple tweaks I need to make to appease various stakeholders, and I'm hopeful my team will be interested in using this tool.
Feb 5 •Â
How to use a Productivity Resource Type in the Excel Template
Hi, I'm looking for some help with the excel estimating tool. In your video tutorial, you add a resource with a "type" of productivity, and then I do not see any examples of this being used in the video or the template I downloaded. I mostly estimate engineering activities for DCS automation projects so I think mostly in hours/activity. So the productivity resource made sense for me to use, but when I went to use it on an activity sheet, i realized it just returns the number of hours but in $ units which is meaningless. How do you practically use this resource?? Stumbled on your channel today, thank you for sharing!
1 like • Feb 5
Maybe I can rephrase my question to simplify it. What method do you use to combine two resources, where one resource's units are in "man hours per task", and the other resource is "$/hour".
0 likes • Feb 6
OK, yeah, I was understanding the math. I think I was just struggling with how to enter the resources. So in my example, we program control modules. There is no direct cost to a control module (like a form has), only the labor it takes to produce one. So I have entered the resource as shown on the screenshot attached. Is this a good approach? any phrasing or improvements you would make to help clarify what I'm doing?
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