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After several months of Beta testing and a patch release, I'm really happy to announce that AutoBid Mechanical 2010 v1 is now in general release.  The highlight of this release is our new SIP (Short Interval Planning) feature.  While we know that this feature will be beneficial to estimators, we've designed this feature to specifically allow information from the estimate to be used by Project Managers. Short Interval Planning is one tactic for helping to monitor and control your field costs.  It was highlighted last summer at the MCAA Strategies for JobSite Success seminar.  The idea was to create a short look ahead schedule.  With our new SIP tool, you can use the box-in function (or multi-select) to select a subset of your bid and get material pricing and labor information.  This information can then be printed or exported to Excel so that it can be easily used by the Project Managers.

To go along with the SIP tool, we've also added the ability to filter your takeoff by more than one scope setting at a time.  This will allow you to filter your OnScreen View (OSV) or Graphical TakeOff (GTO)  down to only the systems that you need.  If you'd like to see these features in action or have other questions regarding this release, please feel free to contact me. 

Over the years, we've had many requests from our customers to send out a notice when we know something is not behaving as it should within the software.  We've heard you - and we want to do better.

We've decided that e-mail is our best method to reach our customers.  We are trying to collect contact information for each product that a company owns.  For each product, we have three types of contact:

1.  Primary Contact.  The Primary Contact is designed to be a day-to-day user of the product.  We will send product-specific information to the contacts regarding Product Release Information, Product Service Bulletins, and Education Information to this user.

2.  Shipping Contact - this is the person who is responsible for updating the software. Many companies have this contact be their IT manager. 
3.  Customer Care Contact - this is the person responbile for the Customer Care supporg agreement.  This address may be used in the feature to send billing inforamtion.

If you would like to know your company contact information, please feel free to contact us.  We can get that information to you, and we can update your records as necessary.

Users used to be able to take their mouse and click on any counted item in OSV (OnScreen View) or GTO (Graphical TakeOff View), and it would automatically go to that item in the Audit Trail.In AutoBid® 2009 v1 versions, we created an option to allow users to control this to help speed up takeoff.

You now have to enable the program to find items that have a count of greater than 1. The option is in the Graphical TakeOff View.It’s in the Graphical --> Graphic Screen Customizations pull down.

Go to the “Advanced Tab” and make sure that the “When finding item with the mouse: Find items with count >1 (slower)” is toggled on. That should do the trick.

I am so excited to have this opportunity to reach out and share more information with our customers.   I feel like I’ve worked with many of you in the past – and I hope you’ll find the blog a great way to keep in touch and brush up on the products.

For those of you who don’t know me - who is this crazy woman?  My name is Stacy Zerr and I’m the estimating product manager for QuickPen.  I always tell people that I grew up in the construction industry, and was never smart enough to get out of it.  But in reality, I have a real passion for our mechanical contracting industry. 

I grew up in a residential and light-commercial family construction business.  I have both Mechanical and Construction Engineering degrees from Iowa State University.  I’ve worked for two different mechanical contractors in the Midwest.  I’ve filled the role of Estimating Manager, Project Manager, and Design-Build engineer.  I am so grateful to these companies for giving me the background and on-the-job training.  I can say that I’ve learned more from the field, shop, and seasoned managers than I ever learned in a classroom.  And, as an estimator, I’ve actually implemented and used both the AutoBid SheetMetal and AutoBid Mechanical products. 

This is my second stint at QuickPen with a total of about 7-1/2 years served total experience.  I’ve worked as the Midwest Regional Sales Representative, Consulting Group Manager, Customer Liason, and currently I’m the Product Manager for our estimating products.  Working with customers is my favorite parts of this job – talking with people to see how they are utilizing our products and find out what’s happening in the industry.  I’m proud when I see our software making someone more productive and profitable.  I’m honored to be part of a company that helps change the way our industry does business.  Honestly – can you tell that I LOVE my job?    

I plan on using this blog as an outreach to our customers.  We have over 1500 companies who use our estimating products.  I’d love to be able to reach out to each of you personally, but that isn’t possible.  So, I hope this blog will give you a lot of the tips and tricks to help improve the way that you use our software and keep you up-to-date on the product.  If you have any product suggestions or blog ideas, please contact me.

When I’m not working, I spend my time with my nearly 6-year-old twins, Tanner and Morgan and my husband, Randy.   As a family, we’re active with several local organizations that support causes we firmly believe in – March of Dimes,  Organ Donor Alliance, and American Liver Foundation.

Congratulations to the New York Yankees on their World Series Championship. But did you know that the hot-hitting team’s new $1.5 billion home was a BIM project? The Constructonomics blog is out with an interesting article that goes into more detail about how Building Information Modeling was used to cut costs and increase project coordination. A key takeaway? During the economic downturn is a great time for contractors to adopt BIM:

"Subcontractors should take this downturn that we have right now and invest. If money is available for anything, they should invest in [BIM] technology to be ready for the explosion that’s going to happen in 2013 or 2014 when we finally wake up and realize that it’s time to go back to work."

Read the whole story on the Constructonomics blog: http://constructonomics.blogspot.com/2009/11/yankee-stadium-product-of-bim.html .