Best Practices - Civil

Had a couple questions for Bryan Kellenberg from a fellow civil estimator building formulas in (thankfully) metric. Hopefully you catch this.

1. How are you approaching manholes?

While I can create a count item takeoff, barrel as an item underneath is variable and changes with each count so it seems to me you need to create a separate takeoff item for each one at this point.

2. What are you doing with your takeoff after ZZTakeoff?

Heavybid over here and I've created item and template libraries in ZZTakeoff that match my resource (3500) and activity (1400) codebooks in HeavyBid through custom properties. I export three reports for Bid Item, Activity and Resources and then import them into Heavybid in that order. First import creates my Bid Items. Second adds Activities under the Bid Items which auto pulls the activity from the Codebook if the custom property matches the Activity Code. Third import adds or updates resources to the Activity under the Bid Item. Still fine tuning things but what's nice is that i can have a takeoff that pulls in crew and common materials and then can update variable items. For instance if I've got 12 manholes I need 12 frames and covers, a variable amount of 42" barrel and some TBD quantity of prebenched bases. My standard manhole activity template in Heavybid already has 1 frame and cover for each, a barrel item set to 0 ft and no prebenched bases. When I import the resource report it overwrites the barrel quantity and adds the prebenched bases.

3. How do you approach import vs. native backfill?

I've written a couple formulas that can work off a checkbox but I'm not sure I'm saving any time at this point until estimate level variables or sub assemblies come available.

Team ZZTakeoff - any chance of subforums for the major subtrades or better to just start a discussion like this in Q & A? I'm sure the MEP guys are 'going what is he on about?'