AACE Bridging the Gap Between Estimating and Scheduling

Luis Terry:

So hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. While everyone is entering the room, I would like to go over a few housekeeping rules for this event. Okay?

My name is Luis Terry, I will be your host today. I am a PSP and a CEP, so, very interested in how I can bridge my two certifications today. The presenters will be taking questions. As we go, if you have questions, please include the question in the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. Please note that you can upvote the questions by just doing a like, a thumbs up next to each question. The question with the most upvotes will be addressed first. Okay? Keep that in mind. If we don’t get to your question live, the presenters will attempt to answer all your questions in a follow-up email, thank you for doing that. Today’s presentation is CEU eligible and it’s being recorded. Attendees will also be receiving a copy of the presentation in their email within the next 48 hours, and a certificate of attendance.

Today’s webinar, Bridging the Gap Between Estimating and Scheduling, is sponsored by InEight. We have a couple of speakers from InEight team today. First, we have Jordan Brooks, Product Director at InEight. Jordan’s real world experience and knowledge of project controls practices is prevalent in the technological advances, his team delivers in construction planning software. Prior to InEight, Jordan gained invaluable experience and [inaudible 00:01:52] working on programs for large capital projects, ranging in size from five million to $10 billion. During his time at one of North America’s largest construction and engineering firms, he became a trusted internal advisor for all teams planning and scheduling, conducting forensic analysis, facilitating risk workshops, and providing guidance during complex project plans, while maintaining company software databases and consulting and project control data architecture and reporting.

Our second presenter today is Dominic Cozzetto, Product Director at InEight. He leads product development for InEight Estimate, which helps teams quickly build accurate estimates for capital construction products. Before joining InEight, Dominic held various leadership roles at TIC for 12 years. These positions include field coordinator, field engineer, cost control engineer, product engineer, and lead estimator on multiple small and mega projects, primarily in the power and industrial sectors. Dominic also played a key leadership role in implementing a corporate wide estimating solution, Hard Dollar at TIC.

Without any further delay, I will turn it over to today’s presenters. Thank you for attending.

Jordan Brooks:

Thanks, Luis. He had the hardest part by far there, so I’ll get into the easy part.

We’re going to start a poll now. So, go ahead and please take a couple minutes to answer that. I’ll give you a minute 45 seconds and talk through while that’s going on. And thank you for joining, also.

So real quick, just while you’re taking that poll, wanted to do a quick intro of who InEight is. For those of you who have or have not heard about us, maybe a review for some. But InEight is a SaaS company that provides solutions for capital project stakeholders. Founded in 2014, you can see we’re managing globally over $1 trillion worth of work across 60 countries. So, you can see solutions that InEight platform offers as a whole. We’ll be focusing on the estimating and scheduling solution today. If you want any more information after the webinar, by all means, reach out to Dom or myself, or go ahead and look on the web. We’re all across the web. So, and again, thank you for joining us, it’s a pleasure talking to everyone.

So, okay, we’ll go ahead and end that poll. Okay, so let me bring up the results here. Hopefully you’re seeing those, but this just gives Dom and I an idea of who’s attending today, knowing our audience, and who to tailor some of the comments and what we go through too. So, it looks like we’ve got a lot of GCs in the group, majority of GC, 31%, but then right behind that, consultant at 27. And I always don’t want to forget about the owners and owner’s reps, we see a couple of those coming in, and the subs. It’s good, it’s a wide variety, so that’s great. And then type of organizations looks like… Or excuse me, role in organization, project management, cost controller, scheduler, that’s what I would expect. Okay, great. All right. Appreciate it again.

So, real quick, key takeaways from the webinar today. We’re going to go through identifying common issues you have between bridging the gap between estimating and scheduling. So really, what we’re talking about is integrating, estimating, and scheduling. Right? When you get down to it, bridging the gap is integrating them. So we’re going to go through some of the common issues that we’ve seen and what we’ve seen from our users in the past about those issues that arise. We’re going to go through, what is the benefit of integrating? So obviously we’re going to go through some common issues. The question is, well, if there are issues, why do it? So, we’ll go through the benefits of those. And then we’ll also talk through some strategies on how to make that process easier from estimate to schedule. Dom and I both have had some experience working through both sides of these and we’ll go through those.

So, just reiterating the topics we’ll cover. Dom’s going to cover the common issues and the benefits that come with the integration of estimating and schedule. I’ll go through some case studies, some real world examples of where there are benefits and some of the issues you can run into when you even integrate those. And then Dom and I both will cover the implementation strategies we’ve seen that have worked for us in the past and others. And then at the very last, we’ll talk through some technological solutions and why you should be looking to technology to help you with these benefits and to decrease the issues that you see from estimating and cost integration.

So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Dom to go through common issues here.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Awesome. Thanks, Jordan. Go ahead and go to that next one. All right. I will get in a little bit of a soapbox here, just because we’re going to be going over a lot of best practices here, probably a lot of things that you might’ve heard before. Just because you think their best practices might not be something somebody else knows on the chat. So, I’ve had that discussion with a few people before, that it really depends on your market, your company, your processes built inside of your company that’s made them successful in the past, where maybe these are things that are common knowledge to you but are not common knowledge to everybody else. So, take what you can from it and we’ll go through what we’ve seen in our experience.

So, there is an absolute link between estimating and scheduling, and it really is, I mean, Jordan uses this all the time, two sides of the same coin. Right? You are on the same thing but you’re viewing it from usually a different aspect here, and they really tend to be those two different domains. I have been an estimator that has built my own estimate schedule. That is absolutely a role I’ve done on a very small project. I’ve been on a giant estimate that was more than $5 billion, where not only did we have one scheduler, we had three dedicated schedulers just for the estimate schedule inside there. And it really does take a lot of communication between those two, because good estimating is not just pricing out quantities, right? Good estimating is actually building up a plan, communicating that to the schedulers, using past knowledge, past data, and building up that schedule.

So, one of the biggest issues that we see are those two groups not talking to each other during the building of the estimate and the building of that estimate schedule, but both of them actually reflect the work plan. Like I said, a great estimate does not have just numbers and dollars towards quantities. It is actually, hey, this is what we’ve done in the past to get a work sequence inside here as well. So, let’s go ahead and make sure that what we’re bidding the work on the installation side, we’re putting in the work plan, putting in the schedule as well.

Misalignments lead to budget overruns and project delays, absolutely, and that misalignment between estimating and scheduling can lead to change orders, claims, reduced confidence from stakeholders. I think one of the biggest costs that you do see on projects are duration-driven costs. So, if we’re not taking that duration into account for those indirects, maybe temp facilities. One thing I see overrun on 80% of jobs is like temporary scaffolding. So, if I’m not planning for that scaffolding to be out there for the appropriate amount of time, that’s always going to overrun on that project. So it’s very, very important to get this right during the estimate, even though it’s less detailed than a project schedule, and then really build confidence with your stakeholders, with your owners, with your clients that, hey, not only do we have the costs covered, but our schedule is reliable and can be leaned on so we know when we’re going to finish this project as well. Go ahead, Jordan.

So, biggest common issues we’ve really seen are integration challenges, because you don’t usually… I don’t think I’ve ever seen an estimating product that’s also a CPM product. Right? There’s not really that on both sides. We love showing this very common spreadsheet approach on here because that is what we see a lot as not only people using for an estimating tool, but also a schedule. And it’s separate and it’s on somebody’s computer over here, somebody’s SharePoint over there, and are we working off the same thing? Are we not? Who broke the link? Is there a password? This is probably from the technology side, the biggest competitor to everybody else, is actually just side spreadsheets. So they’re always disconnected, they’re never really running the proper things, but that’s the biggest errors that we see in most processes now.

There are structural differences in a cost estimate and a schedule. I’m making sure I structure that cost estimate so I can review it and that I’m covering all of my dollars, all of my hours. On that estimate or on the schedule, I’m trying to put together that work breakdown schedule on how we’re actually going to have a path of construction and go through and build that job. So, getting that to link properly, and if I change my cost over my estimate and my durations over here, how does that translate back? Do I have my proper durations for all my indirects, for everything else on my estimating side? It’s really a challenging issue. We’ve seen a lot of great solutions and we’ve seen a lot of mistakes continually made the same every single time.

Resistance to change is bigger than I ever thought it would be. That if I’ve done this for 25 years and I’ve been in the industry for 20 years now, I understand that, hey, this works, why are we changing? But that is something that we see during our integrated platform that we can really start helping you save time in mundane button pushing going back and forth, to now I can actually get smarter in the way I’m bidding jobs and the way I’m planning my execution of that work.

Lack of standardization is another big one. We work with a lot of very large companies that have different business sectors. So, my industrial division isn’t doing the things quite the same as my infrastructure division, and that’s fine. But within those divisions, we start to see a lack of standardization even between estimators. So, now I have a different cost structure in one estimate that I do for the next, depending on who my lead estimator is, and not only is that a challenge for me to review as an estimate lead, it’s also a challenge for me as someone who’s done just structural still estimating. Now I’m structuring it differently depending on who I’m working for, and that often leads to just wasted time, wasted energy and inconsistencies in how I’m getting it into whatever system I’m using.

And it’s a very highly manual effort, especially linking between an estimate and a schedule, especially during estimate review time when I’m making changes, trying to get those changes bucketed up different than the way I’m costing them, and into the schedule for that work breakdown structure, and then back over to my estimate for maybe some duration based costs. It’s really button pushing, people hopefully in the same room on the same team chat, hopefully not working on different estimates at the same time, which we all know we are. So, those are really manual, and every time you introduce a manual process, you’re introducing the ability to make mistakes just through that time crunch at the end of a bid. So, these are very common, we see them all over the place. Even people that are standardized, you still have manual efforts. People who are very open to change still have the structural differences in those estimates and the schedule. So, you might be hitting four out of five of these and you might be missing that last chunk. So go ahead, Jordan.

So, we’re talking about integrating these on a technology side and what the benefits are to those. So go ahead. And we like to really ask this, who has gone about the process of actually integrating these together? Whether it be a, dump to a spreadsheet, bring in, back and forth, who knows? But we’ve asked this question a couple of times, we presented at AACE National and got a lot of feedback from there. This is a lot lower of a percentage than I thought it would be. Or the perception of the integration is, hey, I’m integrating my estimate to dumping it out to a spreadsheet, bringing it in over here to my scheduling software, dumping that out to a spreadsheet, emailing that back to my estimator, having them punch it into the solution. So the concept of integration might be different, the concept of what that actually means might be different, but it’s absolutely, I see some of the chats open, it’s definitely not a seamless process, right? Not right now. So Jordan, go ahead.

So, the benefits of an effective integration, Jordan does, like we said, run our scheduling technology here at InEight. I do run our estimate technology here today, and we have made an integration between them. And what that does is it actually increases the accuracy and it cuts down the amount of time and back and forth between your estimators and your schedulers. One big benefit that we’ve seen that I don’t know if we really thought it all the way through, but it really enhanced the forecasting and risk management. Jordan has a risk tool, we get all the cost over to that risk tool, and you’re able to do that risk mitigation through your estimate process, maybe contingency, maybe all kinds of things that you can look at to make sure you’re hitting that risk to what level of comfort you want during your estimate.

That resource allocation and team collaboration, now I’m not emailing things out, going and checking back. I know that that data’s available, so I go grab that data, bring it in my system. If I have questions, I can go talk to that person. We’re not doing a manual push, so my estimate’s not just changing randomly without me knowing because the scheduler’s in there making changes. But it really helps with that team collaboration and you’re not button pushing and just manually entering possibly a very large schedule.

Improved predictability of cashflow, it’s a big thing. Every job that I put a proposal in for, you had to have a cashflow curve with it. And whether I’m loading it from actual data or that’s the last thing that I made in my proposal and I’m putting it in, it takes a lot of time and it’s very important to get that cashflow correctly on every project, especially when you get to those very large ones.

And then greater transparency for the stakeholders. I have one estimates that we were not the low cost on because of how transparent we were in the schedule. If you have a really good project plan and a really good schedule built, especially through an integrated platform, it actually gives a greater confidence in your proposal as a whole because they know you’ve planned for these maybe mitigating factors. So, very important on that one, especially knowing that you can go into a proposal without the low cost but with the best plan and be awarded that job at a dollar wise that you’re comfortable with. So Jordan, go ahead. Over to you, bud.

Jordan Brooks:

All right, thanks, Dom. So I’m going to go through some case studies. A lot of the challenges, and then also benefits will be covered in both of these case studies. The one thing you’ll pick up on is even if you do something perfect, there are always limitations to the technology. There are always issues that you have to work through. So, both jobs were presented with issues but I’m going to try and present at least a bad case study initially, and then go into a good case study just so you can see the differences between the two and how we handled those.

So this first one I’m going to jump into, it was a light rail project, $330 million. There was a cost-loaded schedule, and the structure of that cost-loaded schedule was established at execution time. So, I came on this job at execution time after the bid phase. The job had been won, there was no estimate schedule that the baseline schedule tied to. So this cost-loaded schedule that I basically adopted was already built for me, and I had to go through the process of cost loading this schedule and it being a cost-loaded schedule that the structure was established really by the owner, but it was established late in the process. There obviously were some challenges of trying to align our structure with that owner’s preferred structure. It was a payout of schedule type of job, so we submitted a schedule that was cost-loaded. The owner would say yes or no, and based on the percent complete and the dollars of actual cost in that schedule is what we would get paid on a monthly basis.

So you can imagine with it being cost-loaded, pay by schedule, the person who developed the baseline schedule made it very detailed, which happens quite often. Oftentimes when it’s a pay by schedule and it’s going to be cost-loaded, you break it down into minute detail so that you can get cost benefits back from submitting a schedule. So when I accept a piece of equipment, I want it to say, “Oh, here’s my acceptance. I want to get paid for that. Here’s the percent complete.” Instead of having those higher level line items that you have to guess what the percent complete of is for accepting delivery and storing it, because it’s not ready to be installed yet, things like that. So, it was a very detailed schedule. And because of that, we had to do a lot of magic, I’ll say, mapping with these structures to make it work.

You can see right here, it presented itself with a lot of side spreadsheet work, a lot of maintenance on a monthly basis. So when I got to the job, they handed me the schedule, they handed me the control budget, and they said, “Okay, we need you to map these.” So I put together two spreadsheets like you saw Dom present earlier, and it was side spreadsheets. It was on my local machine, on my computer, so only really I had access to it. And on a monthly basis, if there was change orders or changes to how dollar amounts were in the budget, I had to go through every time and adjust those. And it was down to a resource assignment level within my schedule, and it was a very detailed schedule.

So, I think we had somewhere around 10,000 line items and a $330 million job. It was a lot of manual labor that had to go into this. And that really, what I tie that back to is really the structures being established late. Like I said, there was no estimate schedule. There was an estimate obviously that we won the job off of. And then we went at baseline time with a schedule that had nothing to do really with the estimate because they weren’t tied together. So, what scope was where within that schedule was really up to me to figure out. And I’m the scheduler coming into execution time, not being on the bid. I mean, it was me just going blind into this and guessing. So, there was a lot of growing pains with this schedule early on.

I threw this network diagram on here just to show complexity of that schedule. It was very complex, there were relationships everywhere. It was a 10,000 line item schedule. You can imagine, I mean, there’s start to start, finish to finishes, finish to starts, all over the board. It was hard to tell what linked to what. On top of that, it was a light rail job and it went in segments. So, if one segment changed and we decided to do segment two before segment one for whatever reason, then I had to change a ton of logic within there. And on top of that, make sure the budget aligned with what we had in the cost control budget on the control side. So, with that side spreadsheet, it was very manual, it was a very detailed schedule, and there was absolutely scope creep.

So, not knowing what scope was where from the get go created a scenario where when scope was added, we had to go do our due diligence as best as we could within this detailed schedule to say, “Is this scope already covered somewhere or are we not accounting for it?” And if we weren’t accounting for it, then we had to get it entered in there and get it cost loaded and then hopefully get paid for it down the line. So, it just became a pain in the butt to deal with on a monthly basis, honestly, if we’re going to be honest. It was not a pleasant one, but I did take a lot of lessons learned from that.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Jordan, just a quick question that popped up, we’ll address it right now. How often did you re-baseline that schedule?

Jordan Brooks:

Oh man, that’s a great question. I was on that job somewhere around three years, and within those three years, I think I re-baselined at least 10 times, which is not ideal, because that just means that whatever that milestone you’re heading for, that expectation of the final product kept moving because we had missing scope or change orders or whatever. It was not fun, it was not a fun job. And then on top of that, we did eventually have to go to claims and do it, we had to do forensic analysis on it, which with 10,000 line items and it being cost-loaded, that was a job in and of itself. So, not an exciting job to be a part of.

The next one, so then we go to, this is the good case study. So this is a $500 million job, bridge project. You can see it’s a cantilever bridge, pretty simple, pretty simple bridge project here. But this one, I actually came off of the light rail job and got assigned to this one early on in the estimate phase. And I knew that this job was also going to be required to be cost-loaded early on based on the owner specs.

So, I took the initiative to at estimate times say, “We’re going to align the cost structure and the schedule structure as best as we can.” And what I did was, I kept it as little detail as I could. Higher levels of details, especially at estimate time, make this integration a little bit easier on users. But if you can tie the structure from the estimate and the structure from the cost to a level in the WBS, that helps out a lot. So, at least you know what part of the estimate is going to what part of the schedule. You can track scope, you can track changes to quantities, things like that and keep it, yes, lower detail, but it at least makes sense to the user about where is that cost in my schedule if it is going to be cost loaded and where do the quantities live on these activities. So, we established those structures very early on.

The budget on this one, when we went to execution time, it was conformed off of the estimate and the baseline schedule was built off of the estimate schedule. So, the estimate was used as the basis obviously of the control budget, which is I think very typical, Dom, you can correct me on that, but I think that that’s more common than the estimate schedule being the basis of the baseline schedule. Oftentimes, the estimate schedule just gets thrown out the door and you build a baseline schedule that has no relation to the estimate schedule.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, I’d have to say, and that’s unfortunate because a lot of the cost in that estimate work was based off of that schedule, right?

Jordan Brooks:

Correct.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah.

Jordan Brooks:

Correct, and Dom touched on it, on this job, we established structures early on, we got quantities into the schedule accurately. We did a risk workshop on this job, so I used that cost-loaded schedule to run a risk analysis for the estimate early on, and then we got indirect cost based off of those activity durations that came from that risk workshop. So, all of those things tied back together in a nice workflow. And like Dom pointed out, that therein lies the importance of having that translate to your estimate, or excuse me, your control budget and your baseline schedule based off of what you were estimating at estimate time.

Dominic Cozzetto:

And Jordan, let’s pause right there because Mike asked a good question here that ties in nicely. And at what estimate level would the integration become necessary? Level one, preliminary stage or level three or level four or five? I’d have to say that is definitely depending on the type of project, the owner requirements. But I can say if I give at least a level three detail to the project execution team, you’re more likely to get your project schedule built off of that estimate schedule, instead of giving them a level one where they just throw that whole thing away and go to town on their own.

So, I have been part of bids that required a level four, level five, but that is very intense. I think that was a year and a half on that one estimate. So that was, everything was 90% or 80% designed out at that point. We had a lot of detail, and that was more of a partnership with the engineer and the owner than it was a regular estimate. So, pending the type of estimate and all those things, I would say at least a level three, if you have time to do it, is probably the best reactions that I’ve got when turning that schedule in during a proposal as well. So, anything else on that, Jordan?

Jordan Brooks:

No, I think I completely agree. I mean, I think a level one, like you said, a lot of times it doesn’t mean much. The job team might just throw that away and you’ve lost the whole point of integrating at estimate time. A level five, I mean, estimates, you can kid yourself on how you think you know the job’s going to go, but as soon as you win that job, a lot of the times in general contractor’s cases, you have a whole new team who’s doing the execution. So they may look at that level five schedule and say, “This is way too detailed. This is not how we’re going to build it,” and they end up having to throw it out and build a new baseline schedule. So, I think there is a sweet spot, but again, like Dom pointed out, you got to pay attention to what the requirements are from your owner and what works best for you, so.

Dominic Cozzetto:

And also, if you have two weeks to produce the bid and it’s a month-long project, you’re probably not giving a level five for either of those.

Jordan Brooks:

Absolutely.

Dominic Cozzetto:

So, always pending the type and end size of the project.

Jordan Brooks:

So some other things that, just to keep in mind for this, why it was a good case study. We talked about the structures established early on. The budget was conformed off of the estimate, that’s an important part. Level of detail was contained, I touched on that. I’ve seen times when people outsmart themselves with estimate schedules. There’s no reason to do that. Keep it as detailed as you need it to make it work and make sense and get some useful workflows out of those. You want to be able to get your indirects down to a relatively close cost and you want to be able to run a risk analysis that’s somewhat accurate and useful. So, you need it down to a detail that’s useful for you, but don’t go too detailed and don’t keep it not enough detail in that schedule early on.

Budget adherence. So again, this is just if you integrate these two early on, you’ll have budget adherence and it comes with it, it’s a side effect of having an integrated system. But make sure the quantities that are coming from estimate are shown and accounted for in schedule, whether you’re tracking that at a man-hour or at a quantity, at a cost level, make sure those align. If you’re doing all three, great, but make sure they align, right? That’s the important part there.

And then in this case, it did avoid scope creep. So, we knew that the scope that was included in the estimate was included in the schedule, it was conformed into the budget, that it was the basis of your baseline schedule. Therefore, if something popped up, we didn’t really have to question whether or not it was extra work and should be a change order. That was an easy discussion with the owner to say, “This is based off the estimate. We can show you exactly what line item this came from, so we know that this is or isn’t extra work.” All of those conversations became easier between the general contractor and the owner at that time. So, those are some of the benefits we got from this specific case study.

Okay. So, Dom’s going to cover the implementation strategies, but we’ll both go back and forth on this one here. So I’ll go to the next and I’ll turn it over to Dom at first to read through it.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Go ahead. Yeah, so, and there was some talk in the chat, there was some talk in the questions is really, how do you implement this properly? Because a lot of the times you have that you have an OBS, if you have your cost structure different in your estimate and your work breakdown structure, over in your schedule to actually properly plan that work, how do you implement that and actually get to a smooth adoption there?

And I have to jump out and say, because I’ve done a lot of work in the field as well, the claiming is very important on that one, just because if you’re accurate and you’re claiming, you actually know where you’re at. I had a superintendent drill it in our heads, “If you don’t know where we are, you can’t tell me when we’re going to finish.” So, if you’re not implementing that claiming properly, and this is more not on the estimate but the field execution side when you’re not progressing your activities correctly, you actually have a very odd moving target at the end of that project that can cause a lot of issues for someone who… like I’ve been the last person on a job and trying to get all those change orders and claims closed out. It would’ve been easily avoided if we would’ve done that properly in the field, so.

Jordan Brooks:

And I will add here, this goes back to that bad case study that I presented or poor case study with claiming.

I touched on it, but one real life example was we had activities in there that was install a certain vendor’s material, and we actually got those delivered to site early on. And so, we had to unload that material and then store it. And at the month end, we wanted to get paid because we had to pay the vendor for delivering the material. Well, the owner’s like, “Well, you haven’t installed it and the activity you’re showing in the schedule says install material.” So there was a little bit back and forth on how we should correctly claim this. If we would’ve known that early on, we would’ve been able to handle it and had an unload activity added to the schedule earlier. There was back and forth, the owner worked with us on this one. Actually, it ended up being fine, but that was just some things that we had to go through early on that we wouldn’t have had to if we would’ve known what type of claiming scheme or structure we should be aligning with. So, just something to keep in mind.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, yeah. And then I’m going to address that owner because it is the top question right now. It’s more of a comment where the owner wanted lines and the estimate to be the same as the schedule for transparency. And that really is that, what is it, the owner buy-in and early alignment are critical to success. The last thing you want to do there is be running your schedule in a different structure that your owner requires, and you’re trying to basically have two different schedules at the same time. And a lot of that can be handled during that early estimate process when you build that initial level three schedule.

Yeah, just talk it out with that owner upon award and see, because a lot of times there, I was helping with a advanced work package, very critical owner that wanted it a certain way and every IWP needed to be its own activity line, and they wanted that during the estimate, and I had no idea how we were going to do that in the estimate. So, a lot of back and forth with the owner on that one to get them that CWP level instead, if you guys know that terminology, because if not, it just becomes a giant nightmare where you have just multiple, I think it’s like a two or three week time cap on those IWPs and you’re trying to roll that all up to an activity and communicate that back and forth. And that’s just going to end up taking more people in your indirects to try to manage that. So, that early alignments and that communication with the owner, just to know what they need. And that leaks into that last one about reporting and transparency.

Just know what you’re buying into on that front end during the estimate, because that has turned around and bid up a lot of us on the execution side, when you’re actually required to give way more detail or a different alignment than what you’re prepared to do on the estimating side. Jordan, I don’t know if you’ve run across any of that. I’m sure you have, but.

Jordan Brooks:

Yeah, I was going to touch on the owner buy-in one, which you covered most of the points I was going to say. But even in my experience, if you get in with the owner early enough at estimate time and they’re talking about you needing a one-to-one alignment between the estimate and the schedule, and you have a different approach to it, a lot of times owners can be, I would say in my experience, flexible, and they will allow you to adjust that as needed to make sense. So, if you work with them early on, a lot of times those specs you see maybe have written for a different project and it’s a boilerplate spec that they had no idea what they said at the time. So if you go and present it to them and say, “Hey, I want to do it a different way,” then maybe they work with you early on and are a little bit more flexible. I’ve seen that in my experience, where they’re absolutely flexible to work with you for whatever works, so.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, especially on the estimate side when they want a third pay item form filled out that doesn’t line up with your cost approach or your work breakdown approach either. So, there were proposals where I had three different structures of all the same thing, right? So it’s easy to make mistakes and have errors throughout those, and it’s kind of a pain. So, getting that aligned early on with the owner is very, very helpful.

I think the software limitations we can probably address during some of the questions that I’m seeing rolling in here, Jordan. So I think-

Jordan Brooks:

100%.

Dominic Cozzetto:

… [inaudible 00:36:32] on the slide.

Jordan Brooks:

100%, okay. So real quick, in conclusion, Dom and I covered some of the challenges that exist. I want it to be known challenges, and I covered this a little bit already or mentioned it at least, challenges will always exist. No matter what process or standardization you have, there’s going to be challenges. If you get in those early on though and you have an idea of what you want to do and you approach it from a perspective where you want to work with other stakeholders to address what the actual need is, I think that those challenges can be minimized and mitigated as much as possible. But they will always exist, and just be aware of that and plan on it.

Benefits, I think some of the benefits that you get from estimate schedule integration, and Dom covered those, I think they’re too great to not do this. They’re too great to ignore. You get a ton of benefits, especially if you’re doing, like we talked about, if you’re conforming your control budget off of your estimate, and then you’re also building your baseline off of your estimate schedule, the benefits you get from that are too great to ignore and not do. So, keep that in mind when you’re going through that.

Strategies that can ease the burden, we covered those. But I think the one big one, and Dom covered those last slides with the implementation strategies, but this big one, technology can be your friend. I mean, even the most manual one, which I walked through with my first case study where you have side spreadsheet, still took technology to do it. So, keep in mind that you don’t have to do this on a piece of paper on the side, you don’t have to be the only one doing this. Technology can help out and it can also get collaboration between teams to help benefit you and make this a smoother transition or a smoother process when you’re trying to integrate estimate and schedule.

So, we do want to leave you with an action plan before we go to questions here. So I will say these have been covered in depth by both Dom and I, but I’ll reiterate it just before we leave this. Make sure you’re considering level of detail early on. Dom talked about it, he usually recommends about a level three schedule when you’re doing an estimate schedule. I mean, I think that that is a sweet spot, but again, that may not be allowable based on what the requirements are or what your standardization process is, and that’s fine, but just make sure you’re considering it. Take into account, if we do win this job, what does claiming look like if I win this job and I have to use this level of detail to go ask for payment at the end of a week or a month from an owner. Make sure you’re keeping that in mind.

Don’t create structures in a silo. Dom talked about this. He obviously wasn’t in a silo when he was doing both of them himself. He was the silo, but at least he knew what he was doing. Make sure if you are working on a bigger team that has an estimator or an estimating team and a scheduler or a scheduling team, make sure they’re talking. But also make sure you’re talking to the owner early on about what your process is and what you’re attempting to do with this estimate schedule integration, just so they know.

Dominic Cozzetto:

And engage that scheduler if you or assigned scheduler early on in that bid. Don’t go and say, “Hey, we’ve got to review in two days. Make sure you pound this out for me,” because that’s never a good way to make friends like Jordan, so.

Jordan Brooks:

That never happens, right, Dom? Never happens.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Never.

Jordan Brooks:

Schedule’s never an afterthought at estimate time. And then always, we like to touch on this one, but always look at advancing technology for efficiency improvements. We’ve seen not just InEight but other products that are advancing their technology, especially in the construction and design world. Make sure you’re always looking for what could help you with these. That’s something you want to keep in mind. Go out there and look and see what’s available, what’s going to make your processes easier, especially as there’s more and more construction going on in the world with a lower and lower workforce, technology is going to be the answer, I think, to a lot of these to plug gaps where you don’t have people or staff to do something. So, make sure you’re always looking at, what can make my workflows easier, what can help me out, what can make this process as a whole just smoother for me overall?

Okay, with that, I’m going to turn it over. I think Luis may have some of the questions or Dom you’re handling those, but I’ll turn it over for questions right now. We can go through them.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, and we have quite a few, so we’re not going to get to all these, but thank you for submitting those. I’m going to go from the top down on this, we answered the top two already. Any solution for the challenge in utilizing InEight schedule in lieu of a typical industry standard or contract requirements to publish project schedule with P6. Jordan, I’ll give that one to you.

Jordan Brooks:

Say that one again, Dom. I’m going to pull it up here. That was a long one.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, it’s from Josh Wozniak.

Jordan Brooks:

Okay.

Dominic Cozzetto:

I think I said that correctly. Any solution for the challenge in utilizing InEight schedule in lieu of the typical industry standard or a contract requiring to publish project schedule with P6.

Jordan Brooks:

Gotcha, okay. Okay, I thought that’s what it was. So yeah, we don’t want to turn this specifically into an InEight only thing, but InEight does import and export XCRs, perfectly fine. We test it all the time, it goes in and out of P6 databases perfectly. Dates come in, relationships, logic, all the things you would expect, cost, those go in and out of InEight schedule. And so whenever a client will come to us or a potential client asks us this question, it’s covered. As long as you’re providing an XER that owner or the general contractor’s asking for to be in P6, you just give them an XER and they can dump it right into their database.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect. Thank you, sir. Next one from Maxwell. How do you bring back cost into the initial estimate when your initial duration of completing a task considered and your estimate has gone beyond the initial estimate time? I’ll go ahead and take this one.

I’m not bringing back cost, I’m actually just going to bring back duration. So, I have usually a couple different types of lines in my estimate. Some are driven by just man-hours, so I have the man-hours to produce that work. Doesn’t really matter what that duration is, but then I do have duration-driven costs. So, I am going to basically have a man-hour per duration timeframe, whatever I define that to be. And when I change that duration on my schedule, I will change it on my estimate line, and that will actually drive that cost up or down, depending on what that estimated time is going to do. So, yeah.

Jordan Brooks:

The only workflow, and I’m not saying you’re wrong here, Dom, but the only workflow you and I worked through where we did bring back costs with risk, right?

Dominic Cozzetto:

Correct.

Jordan Brooks:

So there is a specific InEight workflow where we bring back the risk analysis cost into a risk allowance line item and estimate, and that’s the only time we’ve really been doing that, so.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. Current level of InEight schedule versus P6, I will say go to ineight.com, you can check it out there. You can schedule a demo there as well, and we can hit all of that in very great detail. And Jordan might be actually the one helping you out there. So, I’ll just go ahead and plug that instead of trying to make this into a sales pitch.

How is the actual cost compared with the budget costs? Is it a detailed to the work package level of the schedule? A little context on that one would’ve been nice. I’m not too sure when during the presentation we hit that, but you usually do… I mean, Jordan, if you want to hit this, it depends on what level of detail your work packages are. I have seen catastrophe when you try to do an IWP to a schedule. I’ve seen great success when you do that more of that construction work package level to a schedule. And then actual versus budget is just your basic cost management on a project. So, if I’m not hitting that right, submit another question, we’ll try to get that one offline and get it back to you.

Jordan Brooks:

Yeah.

Dominic Cozzetto:

For your light rail work, how did you integrate change orders into the schedule?

Jordan Brooks:

Oh, so, great question. It was very manual, it was a very manual process. So, when we would get a change order or an issue, obviously we would establish if there was any schedule delay from said change order. If there was, it was typically a new activity. That was the easiest way to handle the additional cost from that change order, is I would add an activity into the schedule, I would link it to what I thought it went to, which became my time impact analysis, and then the cost would get inserted to that specific activity. If I had to break it out to more than one activity, which I didn’t like to do, but if I did, I would have to, and then it would be mapped to that said change order line item in the control budget. So, it was a very manual process back in my light rail job.

Dominic Cozzetto:

There are a lot of questions about your case study. I think you might actually have to write up a blog on that and get it out, so we’re going to try to skip over some of those.

This one, I actually want to know the answer to, so I’m going to get this one from David Gonzalez in here. How many cost resources-ish did you have on that project? How did you update resource usage and how did you manage when a new resource came in with new costs? I mean, this is why I want to ask you, were you able to automate that process?

Jordan Brooks:

Yes. In answer to that question, yes, I was able to automate that process. I did have to bring both cost structure and schedule out into an Excel spreadsheet. As most of you know, well, in any technology, there’s typically a template that you can import resource assignments, activities, whatever it is, they give you specifics. So I used those different tabbed approach from my scheduling software to say, here’s the resource assignments. I would input actual cost into said spreadsheet through the mapping, and then it would get imported back into the schedule. If it was a brand new resource with new costs, that typically was just, I mean, I’d have to get approval obviously to do that to the schedule. But yeah, I would add a new resource in there, assign it as a new resource assignment, and then add the cost to it.

But it was a very manual process, I was kind of able to automate it. It was still what I would call for technology nowadays and the strides we’ve made, it was still very manual, but it was somewhat automated at month end, for sure.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Thank you, sir. Paul Brennan, I know that name, locked bid versus unlocked bid. How do you get buy-in from the estimators to do it right and not abide by an owner pay table that has no relation to construction? I’ve been through this. From the estimator side in me, it is about making sure you review that and set your standards upfront. From the technology side of me, I’m going to tell you there is no technology that can also instill business ethics, right? So it’s a hard question. I’ve seen it done both ways. Depending on that owner pay table and the amount of detail that you have in it, and it might be in an indicative bid, so you’re just putting a unit rate, unit dollars to it, versus how long do you actually think it’s going to take and how much money is it going to actually take to build? A lot of that comes down to what additional items you’re estimating and how you’re spreading them across that owner pay table. And I know I’m skirting this answer because there’s no really good silver bullet for this question.

So, expectations upfront with your estimators, expectations on what you’re going to cover in the bid, clarifications to the owner on what you did and did not cover in the bid. And from a software side, making those individual line items that are a little bit different or expanded upon from that owner pay table so you know what you did and did not put inside of those line items.

I saw, oh shoot, it just popped down to the bottom of my questions table. Steven Hall, functionality in the future. The answer to that is yes, Mr. Steven Hall, not too far away either.

I’ll let you take this one, Jordan. Can we utilize the InEight to access cost between original baseline to the revised baseline in relation to claims like acceleration, disruption, prolongation, which is a phenomenal word?

Jordan Brooks:

Can you use InEight to access those? Yeah, I mean, as long as that data’s in InEight, yeah, absolutely you can get to it. You’ll always have access to that estimate schedule so you know what the budget was when you won the job at estimate time, and then when it was originally conformed to the control budget. And then any additional change orders, re-baselines, prolongations, anything like that, obviously you’ll have the schedules in InEight, just like you would in any other scheduling software that you could trace back that change in cost, the change in duration, changed in added activities, whatever it may be over time, all of that’s in there. And then obviously, you have your control budget, which absolutely you can track back, what was the original budget? What is my forecast to cost? What is it now displaying that I’m building towards? So-

Dominic Cozzetto:

I’m going to give you one more, Jordan, and then we’ll wrap this up because there’s a lot of good questions. Thank you for all these. Do you recommend scheduling all costs that are in an estimate?

Jordan Brooks:

Oh, do I recommend scheduling all costs? I would say, no. Now, in the scenario where it was pay by schedule, you’ve got things like insurance costs, things like that have to be dumped into the activities somewhere. And that typically is an agreement with the owner of how much percentage goes into each of those, at least the cost items, and then you just take it from the cost item to your activities through the mapping. But I would say in general, I don’t like to bring in everything from an estimate, and if you don’t have to, then don’t. You just want to know, am I building the schedule that represents the quantities that are in that estimate? Because that’s the important part of the scope is the quantities. Am I building the correct amount of quantity? So, I would say no in general, but sometimes it’s required.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Great, great answer. I’d expand on that too. If you want to do risk as well and make sure that you’re assessing all the risk on a job, maybe getting all of those costs over so you can assess, that would be nice, but it’s not that you have to schedule them.

One last one, then I’ll turn it over to Luis. For me, the last question on here says how do you manage the bid missing items? As a estimator in my past life, I’ll have to say, how dare you? Estimators never miss anything. So Luis, back over to you, buddy.

Luis Terry:

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the great presentation and to all the attendees for the engagement. On behalf of AACE, I would like to thank InEight and the presenters for your time today, great presentation. Just a reminder, this event is CEU eligible and attendees will receive a certificate of attendance in a post-event email from the AACE team within the next couple of days. Okay? Thank you for joining us, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Jordan Brooks:

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Luis.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Appreciate it.

Luis Terry:

Bye.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Bye.