Trimble Construction

7 CHALLENGE: Limited expertise causes bottlenecking Estimators provide an invaluable service to the steel fabrication process and few on the team match their specic expertise. However, many fabricators face the challenge that there are too few estimators for the amount of work that is coming into the shop. These lead or senior estimators are often armed with the years of experience and specialized knowledge it may take to quickly and accurately estimate a job to make a fabricator protable. But, if that skill resides solely in the minds of your most talented estimators, you run the risk of bottlenecking. This lack of quality, coordinated and timely information results in too many projects for bid and not enough estimators to process the request. This means lost jobs or potential for risk of over/underbidding. SOLUTION: Knowledge democratization Overcome bottlenecking by extracting tribal knowledge from the most experienced estimators and making that information available and understandable to everyone on the team. Sharing knowledge helps make the estimating process more comprehensible and therefore, more transparent. This promotes ongoing collaboration and exposes the process to a new diversity of scrutiny which helps reduce errors. This can be accomplished through simple, standardization e‡orts: • Standardize bidding forms • Log material and labor rates in a central location • Integrate historical values One of the greatest benets of demystifying project estimating is that the process eventually becomes duplicatable. Establishing repeatable processes from the outset might require a little extra work, but will make your job far easier in the long run. You and your team no longer have to reinvent the wheel with every project. Create the necessary templates, databases and swipe les to streamline repetitive tasks and you'll soon uncover improvements in workow speed, accuracy and protability. Timeliness of Estimates

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