For companies involved in excavation, grading, pipe laying and other activities where number of equipment pieces vary with the project there is a tendency to make crews for each possible equipment combination. For example for excavating, load and haul you can have a crew for one excavator/one truck and another one for one excavator/two trucks etc and then for the activity codebook you will have to have an activity for each one of these variations. This approach can be overwhelming for anyone developing the Activity Codebook, especially for a new customer.  Instead try this approach. Have a general crew for a group of activities. For example use a single crew – EXD for Excavate and Haul with one truck in the crew and maybe a loader. If you review your crews most likely a dozen crews can be reduced to two or three making tagging crews to Activities in the Activity Codebook a much less daunting task. The following would be the estimate workflow:

  1. Bring Activities into the estimate. The Master Estimate used to create the estimate would have a simplified list of crews.
  2. After all biditems are complete in the estimate print  a crew resource report and print only crews in the estimate. See below.

3. Then modify crews in the crew setup. It is something that probably has to occur anyway since most projects are unique in some way. Trucking distance and number of trucks required must be a consideration. And the estimator can look at the estimate from a perspective that will more closely reflect how the project will be built. For example once an excavator is on site is not likely to be swapped for a smaller one.

4. The estimator can also copy a particular crew, modify it and selectively have it update some or all. Just use Edit>Replace Crews routine. The advantage of this approach is that is fairly quick and crews are reviewed at a more project level approach than just bringing in a multitude of different crews that won’t reflect the reality of how the project will be constructed.

Take a look at your crews and see if the above workflow solution will make your estimates more accurate and Activity Codebook easier to setup.