[Vince French]

Is this something for a Gantt chart @Doug in order so you can apply dates and critical paths as well?

[Doug McLean]

Not necessarily, but that could grow from this workflow.

I’m looking at something like, what vendors are in this area and what is their scope? Then hopefully keep track of something changes between bid time and order placement.

Something to track the changes to their scope of work.

[David Cutler]

I’m not sure I’m understanding what you are hunting for here @Doug McLean

Are you looking to create a checklist that you would have on each sheet of what scope is included on the sheet – or are you looking to track changes to each trade/suppliers scope on a sheet?

[Doug McLean]

Something along those lines.
My thought process is to show what was included at bid time by what vendor, and then to track those changes as various RFI’s, CCD’s, CO’s, revisions work through the project.
A lot of the time, what was asked for at bid time is not what ends up as the final product, mostly due to buildability issues worked out during the shop drawing phase.
I’m hoping it also becomes a tracking system as well to ensure that the vendor has repriced any and all changes.

And yes, it will also show what is what area to everyone, which has a whole range of benefits in terms of production requirements.

[David Cutler]

I may be over simplifying things @Doug McLean , but could you establish a legend with color codes by vendor with your takeoff and then flatten everything to lock it in as your contract scope?

You could then as built your takeoff as the work is completed/as items are changed or otherwise updated, with a new updated legend to track quantities. You may even be able to cut/paste your original takeoff markup over your flattened takeoff and then change the “live” copy of the markups to match the updated conditions.

Depending upon how you worked your colors you could end up with unchanged areas in black and changes in red – similar to the way the overlay feature works in Revu.

For identifying if the changes have been captured by your vendors you might consider using some custom statuses on your markups.

[Doug McLean]

Change Orders are never simple, especially in Millwork. You think they are, but they’re not.
Sometimes a simple change of a few inches results in needing completely different core materials.
Metals right now are crazy because we can only get certain sizes, what’s worse is that it varies from week to week, month to month on what’s available.

For this one job we’re doing right now, we were able to get 3 x 10’s of Bronze sheets when we bid the job, but now that we’re getting to build it, we can only get 4 x 10’s. It changes the whole takeoff and order process. We might even have to revise the shop drawings because where we would have needed to put a seam in a 39″ wide opening (because we would have needed 2 panels), we can now do in one panel. We also now have a lot more waste to contend with.

[Troy DeGroot]

I stand by my suggestion of creating a custom column called “Responsibility” or “Vendor” and building a choice menu with the different vendor disciplines. Best if you can make the vendors general in case you’re using a different metal fab shop for individual projects. In other words, make “Metal Fab” the choice rather than “Homers Welders”. This way you can filter/sort all your bid materials by the vendor.

I’m not sure how this column impacts your export to Power Query, I’ll leave that to your smart guys.

[Doug McLean]

This is probably how I’m going to do this.
I already have a list of our standard vendor’s, with subjects, will be really easy. The trick will be making sure we actually update the column accordingly once we’ve won a bid.

As for the Power Query, it won’t touch these columns, because the BatchConfig export file only includes for specific columns.

[Troy DeGroot]

Filter the list and update them all at once. I know, it’s the memory part that’s the struggle, not the how-to. 🤣