HardDollar and Primavera Scheduling Integration: Keep Project Budgets and Schedules in Sync

Thank You Bret this is Brad Barth just a little little bit of background real quick my role here at hard dollar is really in everything that has to do with the product itself product strategy product management managing release schedules and things like that and I've been with a company a little over 20 years so go way back here at hard dollar and as Brett mentioned we're going to really focus today on on one aspect of the hard dollar application and that is how the system integrates with Primavera we've spent a lot of time a lot of energy on making sure that we can integrate with with with p6 in a very dynamic way in a real time seamless manner and that's been based on a lot of feedback from from mutual customers of both primavera and hard dollar and so we'll give you a few slides imagine some of you out there are not familiar with hard dollar so I'll give you a little bit of slides to start with I promise I won't spend more than a few minutes on that just to kind of set the stage and then we'll jump in and do an actual scenario and show you some some typical use cases for why would you want to use Primavera and hard dollar together so just as a bit of a background you know on hard dollar itself our our focus is really on on some key markets in terms of oil and gas infrastructure energy utilities sto those types of projects we've been around since the 1980s and that we have thousands of users around the world primarily on the contractor side but also on the owner side and the EPC em side as far as construction managers and engineering companies let me hand it back over to Brett for just a second to talk a little bit about CDP Thank You Brad so CDP is I've been a partner with a hard dollar for for about two and a half three years now and our focus has been for since eighty-three on providing the engineering construction industry with solutions to help them to meet their their project needs so we provide software solutions like hard dollar we also provide training support and integration services we're based in Charlotte North Carolina and we have offices in Richmond Virginia Columbia Maryland and Philadelphia and we do work not only throughout the US but worldwide thank you very much Brad back video great and we're excited to work with CDP and love what they're doing out there in the industry and being able to provide that sort of local of hands-on presence for hard dollars they've been fantastic as you can see here the some of the customers that are that are using the hard dollar solution you can see some of the logos there some of our probably more recognizable companies one thing I'd like to point out though we do have some some of the largest companies in the world are hard dollar customers but we also have a lot of customers in fact the majority of our customers are your small to medium size companies doing all kinds of different projects and different size projects so really we run the gamut of industries and and company sizes so what is higher dollar if you look at this graphic and this kind of sums it up the major things that that folks tend to get involved in when you're when you're taking a project through the lifecycle you kind of started with there's some sort of design take off engineering that goes on to really determine and define the scope of the project then you get into some sort of estimating budgeting cost modeling stage at some point you're developing a schedule for the project as the project gets going you're tracking progress and variances and forecasting and those sorts of things and then ultimately you know along the way your financial system is sort of looking backwards and tracking you know what's happened what have we spent and so forth so the ones in yellow there are the things that hard dollar really focuses on there are obviously systems out there that do a fantastic job in those other blue boxes and obviously today we're going to focus on that one right in the middle so primavera falls right into that schedule slot and then as you can see hard dollar kind of operates on either side of that in the estimating stage and then the progress management and execution stage as far as estimating goes we have a very robust estimating tool set that we've developed over 20 plus years we have just about any way you can think of to put an estimate together whether you want to use third-party data such as RS means you want to bring in quantities and scope from a design or take off system do you want to use your own historic information perhaps for benchmarking or your own templates and of course quotes from subs vendors suppliers of all of that can be incorporated into your cost models and your estimates now one of the things we hear all the time is you know you really can't expect one of my favorite questions is you know do you what do you do first you do an estimate first or do a schedule first and then the best answer that I usually hear is well they're really the same thing that's just a different view of the same thing you can't do one without doing the other so you know Primavera does it does a great job of really applying the timing of a project and understanding relationships between the activities in the project and when they can start etc and it has a little bit of cost capabilities and cost management capabilities but if you want to do a full estimate you know with contingencies and escalations and you know other things that are really not part of the schedule that's where something like hard dollar comes in but it's critical that they work together we can you know we don't believe you can finalize an estimate on the hard dollar side without really understanding what the schedule looks like because that schedule is going to dictate things like simple things like how long is the overall project going to take which might dictate you know are we renting a project trailer and we're paying for that by the month we need to know how many months we have a project manager for the whole project we need to know how how long that cost is going to go on so a lot of thing those are simple examples but obviously a lot of costs in an estimate are going to be a function of the schedule so we've created a very ism it's very dynamic integration between the two tools and you can kind of see here how things line up we don't always use the same terms but things lined up pretty nicely we both work with accounts we both both work with resources activities what Primavera calls a WBS if you're familiar with that term and hard dollar we call it a CBS or cost breakdown structure so the cost breakdown structure really includes it should include costs for everything in the WVS but then there as I mentioned there's probably some other things that you guys have in your budgets and your estimates that you won't necessarily find in a schedule overheads profit contingency things like that this sort of shows a little different view of kind of some sources of information the project gets into that execution stage how do we get data in from the field one of the one of the things that hard dollar does really well is tracking progress and helping you do forecasts at completion and dealing with changes change management and so then the question is where do we get the data that tells us where we're at well you can enter that directly in the hard dollar in terms of tracking your quantities or man-hours or equipment hours and we can calculate earned value from that as well so those those entries can be done directly in hard dollar we can bring them in from a spreadsheet we can bring them in from a timesheet system to give you those quantities and hours as well as from your financial system we work with about 28 I believe it is different financial systems and then lastly here we do have a very nice self-service web-based reporting capability so whether you're using higher dollar for estimating and cost modeling whether you're using it for the project delivery stage and tracking progress and forecast you can feed all that information into our web-based report tool to look across projects maybe to do reports by my division look across disciplines tracked KPIs and again it's a self-service mode so your your your employees even your partners if you authorize can hit a website and look at you know how is a project doing how are we doing overall as a company and things like that so let's talk about who typically uses the hard dollar tool you can kind of see that the roles that are you know most often involved in using both hard dollar and Primavera obviously when you talk about scheduling you're talking about a very common role for Primavera over on the left side when you talk about estimating and project controls anything that has to do with managing cost of a project cost and productivity those roles are you know very heavy hard dollar users and then you have other roles that are kind of they might be read-only roles into both of those systems financial people procurement people owners engineers construction managers etc but you know hard dollar at the end of the day anybody that's looking at cost models looking at cash flow looking at her in value or casting those are typically the types of people that are that are using hard dollars in and out of the tool every day so the benefit that that the system provides you know getting those cost models created more quickly is a huge benefit we find you know customers are reducing the time that is spent managing a project by 15% or more driving those costs down and cutting the time it takes to get to the reports whether it's a you know proposal or a estimate detail report or budget detail report or whether we're talking about project status reports forecast reports you know cutting that time down dramatically which obviously brings costs down with it so let's take a couple of with that background let's take let's take a scenario here a few scenarios and show you how the data moves between hard all in primavera one of those touch points so just to set the stage little but you know we did talk about you know Primavera is it does a great job at applying the timing of a project hard dollar does a great job at modeling the cost of a project and and they really affect each other so we wanted to you know the one thing that we wanted to do when we built this integration was we wanted to eliminate any kind of import/export we didn't want to have to go through some sort of merge purge kind of process we wanted to make it very iterative so you know you can imagine as you do maybe that first estimate and your first schedule and you sort of get things the way you like it well then you know invariably something changes the the scope of the project changes the timing changes so we have to be able to go sort of around that circle multiple times we we need to be able to add scope into the estimate well that scope drives new activities into the schedule if we change the maybe we try to accelerate the project so we need to be able to see how that affects the estimate so we want to be able to easily do what if scenarios and and go through those multiple iterations as the project changes okay so let's let's take a view into that I'm going to just jump over into hard dollar I wish in this sort of a format we could show you two screens because really hard dollar and Primavera are working in the background they're sort of talking and working at the same time but I can only show you one screen at a time so I'll just flip back and forth but what you're looking at here is I've gone into the hard dollar tool I've opened up a project this process job and you can see over on the left the the cost breakdown structure or CBS for this project you can see it's kind of a tree or a hierarchy starting at the top and there are some of those things like I mentioned that you may or may know you don't often see in a schedule but they are part of the budget things like escalation or job management overhead type costs contingencies so those are in our cost breakdown structure and then you really get into the work scope in this case we've organized it by discipline there's some civil work steel work and if I open those up I can see underneath the civil work we've got some various subsections and we can just keep drilling down there's our foundations under that concrete section okay so very much like Primavera in terms of you know it's a hierarchical structure you can break the work down into as much detail as you like and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the estimating side itself but you know suffice to say that there's a lot of different methods to arriving at what you're seeing on this screen so if we look at say that machine excavation tasks you can see we have a budget in here of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars our current estimate or seee is two hundred fourteen thousand for that that's based on about 1800 man-hours seventy-five days of work if I open that up we're going to be able to see you know what is driving that cost in this case it's some-some operated equipment there's equipment with an operator and there's some dump trucks etc each working for different hours that's one way out of probably you know a dozen or more methods of driving the cost of something everything from a simple plug number to a bottoms up estimate using resources and production rates and factors and and all sorts of things can be applied okay but what we're going to see is how this ties in to primavera that duration of 75 days could have been driven from the estimate based on a Productivity rate or in passed a primavera or it could have come back to primavera late we've got 75 days to do this what sort of how you know how big is the crew need to be what sort of production rate do we need to achieve to get it done so this is this you'll see the integration is going to go both ways okay so if we take a couple more glances at a few things here Before we jump into Primavera back on the hard dollar side you see up at the top here that it's escalation item if I drill into that obviously the cost of escalation on a project is going to be a function of the schedule so here you can see a kind of a standard template that we've set up in this job for escalation so we've got you can see those escalation tables can be based on a time frame which might be a whole year it might be just a seasonal thing you can see here right now hard dollar by looking at the Primavera schedule it knows that all the work is going on in 2013 so that as we get into 2014 and 15 there's no escalation being applied okay but it's set up to handle that so if we look at 2014 what we're saying here is any any cost that end up in 2014 we're gonna escalate those by 15% okay and and I've done a nice 15 percent across-the-board but if we could escalate our labor costs differently than our materials and any other cost types that you like and then as we get in if any of the work ends up in 2015 we're going to apply a 20% escalation okay with that simple setup now I can feel free to move the schedule around if the owner directs me to move the schedule we're gonna and some of the cost it ends up in 2014 or 15 then that escalation is going to apply automatically okay let's go take a look now at the corresponding Primavera schedule and then like I said I'm just going to kind of flip back and forth here's our Primavera schedule there's that machine excavation item that we were looking at for 75 days okay so this schedule could have been developed originally and then fed into hard dollar or with the touch of a button hard guard could which is what I did here how I created this schedule for me from the activities that I choose in the and the hard dollar estimate so all of these items came into the schedule automatically their durations came in automatically their resources came in automatically okay so if we look down below we can see there's that dump truck and those operators and those various pieces of equipment so we resource loaded this Primavera schedule automatically hey what's left to do is really the things the Primavera is great at which is figuring out the relationships between the items what are constraints that we're going to have things can't start until a certain date etc okay so now we've got a model both in the schedule and in the in the cost estimate that's tied together so as we start doing some changes we can see how those affect each other okay so this project right now is you see it's going into 2013 let's make some changes that are going to extend the project so maybe we'll let's go take let's take some of these earthwork items that we looks like we assume to start to start connection on those I mean we're going to do some simultaneous work with a little bit of lag there let's make those finished starts or excuse me start to start I'm sorry finish to start let's do that so we'll assume maybe due to the complexity of the work we're going to have to finish each one of those tasks before we can start the next one so let's take let's take that fine grade will go to its relationship and as I said it's currently a start to start with the previous one let's do it as a finish to start and then we'll do the same thing on this next one so you know just by doing those two changes and I'm going to go ahead and update my schedule now we're gonna see the schedule push a little bit and so now those things are happening with finish to start connections okay and now we're into 2014 as our finish date for this project let's do let's take this first task that was gonna happen here so maybe originally we were going to start the project and at the beginning of 2012 obviously we're past that now so now maybe the project is not going to start until you know maybe let's say the end of 2012 so I'm gonna drag that item over put a constraint on it update my schedule and now everything is moving forward okay and then in fact let's move it a little bit more so we get some cost going into 2015 okay so now we can we can answer the question well if we've moved the project start date to where we just moved it and we do the work sequentially rather than we start to starts on those earth work items well now we're now we're finishing into April 2015 okay the beauty is now I don't have to remember to go back to my estimate and reflect those changes if I tab back over to hard dollar now and we say all I've got to do is come up here and say let's update hard dollar from primavera okay so you'll see as that happens and I'm going to say let's go ahead and update the estimate the stand sink again I don't have to worry about what items have changed I don't have to worry about you know coming back and dealing with that escalation so as you can see here as it's updating you see those numbers changing in my escalation so it goes through and it analyzes the Primavera schedule and now you can see we got a whole different picture now for escalation we have higher costs because those costs are more in 2014 a little bit in 2015 so we've we've we've accounted for those costs now in our budget without having to worry about you know going in line by line and remember to do that hey one of the things that we do on the hard dollar side we bring back all of the start and finish dates for the items in the project okay so if I go back to that cost breakdown structure and I'm going to go to a little bit different view now so this view we much like in Primavera we can have different columns turned on in our views I'm gonna go to more of a scheduling oriented view and we'll come down or you can see a bunch of different views that I've created you can create your own views let's go to a schedule setup view and this is where you can control really what happens between hard dollar and Primavera which which items do we want to synchronize with the schedule do we want to roll up items we may have more detail in the budget than we want in the schedule so we can roll items together then if we move over to the right you're going to see there's the start and finish dates for those items that came back in from Primavera okay you see that structural steel item down there we did roll that one up and it's actually some coming up the the children okay so the children are contributing to the schedule but they the start and finish dates are at the parent level so we have one bar of the schedule for all the structural steel okay but those dates come back well what do we do with those dates one of the things hard dollar does with those dates in addition to like you saw on calculating escalation is we can give you a cash flow graph okay so based on our payment schedule from the from the owner if we're playing the contractor role here okay we can see you know looks like we're getting an upfront payment of a certain amount and then we're not getting another you know other payments are driven by work completed payment milestones so based on this extended schedule now you know you can see obviously with that upfront payment we're starting out cash flow positive the green line is above the red line the red line is our cost okay but there is a point here where it's getting pretty close to being underwater there that where our cost is potentially getting right up to our revenue so this is the kind of visibility that you've got by bringing you know the cost and the schedule models together if we were to change anything in the schedule or if we were to change anything in the project and on the hard dollar side we'll see that schedule cash flow graph change so for example you know one of the things hard dollar does is as you see here we model the revenue not just the cost if we go back to this item this project let's say is a there's payment milestones associated with this project with that civil work which you saw on the schedule we go in here and define the earnings rules right now we're saying we get 50% of that items revenue at the start of the excavation and then as we scroll down you can see we got a lot of zeros here we don't get paid anything for fine grading and formwork and rebar in fact we don't get the rest of it and so we're finished doing the embankment okay if we change that and maybe we negotiate with the owner a you know we we want maybe we come down here and we say let's do 25% when we're done with embankment and maybe you know let's move some of that up we get 25% maybe when we're done with the formwork or maybe when we start or work those things are all any of those things are going to have an impact on our cash flow so if we come back here and look at our cash flow now we have a much better picture our cost is still the same all right but now with that you know if we renegotiated the payment milestones now we can see what does that do to our cash flow and it's looking a lot better now obviously sometimes you know your payment milestones are fixed and you don't have control over them like I just did but at least you have visibility to you know what does our costs look like in relation to the revenue now let's go to the other way let's let's take some so we saw how a change in Primavera can drive costs on the hard dollar side and drive cash flow let's go the other direction now let's go back into our estimate here I'm going to go back to that previous view and actually let's go to let's go to a view that's got a little more detail on it let's go to this one here here what I'm gonna do now is let's focus in on those earthwork items that we we moved around on the schedule a little bit lets you know after further evaluation maybe we realized those items are going to be more challenging than we thought so this is what I'm going to do is apply a factor to a couple of those earthwork items and that will extend the duration so you can see right now those durations are you know 75 days 104 days and 250 days let's take the first two items there I'm just gonna highlight them open that up and I'm going to apply a factor so if we go to this factors window here you can have up to 10 different factors on every item you can see I'm using the first of those factors for a geographic influence a second one is a difficulty factor so without you know spending a lot of time redoing the crew and production rate things like that maybe we just want to put a factor of we'll make it an obvious example here we'll put a factor of two on it for difficulty so this is gonna be twice as difficult as our original assumption and by doing that now you're going to see those durations are double what they were before okay so hard dollar has already accounted for that in the cost model in the estimate so that change right there has increased our cost that you see out to the right by the way you see all of these things are in US dollars and that one item there we're actually measuring in another currency and Kulas actually in this case that's really there just to show that we do support multiple currencies you can mix and match currencies in the same project it all adds up and gets converted to US dollars in this case at the bottom okay but but back to the scenario we've doubled the durations for those again now I need to get those durations into the Primavera schedule I don't have to remember to go do those one by one back in Primavera all I've got to do now is today let's update Primavera based on my configuration settings it's saying hey what do you want to update you want it's always going to update the WBS and the activities but you also want to update the resource loading you want to update any actuals which we're not going to do because we're not into the execution stage yet we can update other things if we wanted to turn those on in the settings so I'm just gonna update the resource loading and the WBS which always happens and you're gonna see it's basically going to go through and look at what's changed in the estimate what's different in the estimate that hasn't been pushed over into the schedule and all I've got to do is sit and watch as it does its thing it's going to go through and do that analysis and update those durations in the Primavera schedule accordingly I can keep working while this is going on you see it didn't take too long but if I wanted to I could have minimized that window and continued working but now I'm just going to go back to Primavera if my refresh button and now you can see those durations machine excavation and fine grade are updated in the Primavera schedule one click on the Primavera side to update that schedule using the CPM logic and now all our schedule bars fall into place and we've got a new finish date of December 2015 okay so that gives us you know gives us the ability to do those full circle evaluations dealing with changes looking at you know how does changes to the scope affect the cost and the schedule and then completing that circle back the other direction how does those schedule durations affect the cost back in the estimate you know this new new finish date obviously is going to drive higher escalation cost back in the hard dollar estimate if I wanted to go that was a little bit more detailed example in terms of changing some durations maybe there's a you know we just want to add a new item you know so there's a new scope of work when I come into the hard dollar side we'll just call it new scope and so I can go in and figure out how I want to estimate that that item using all those different approaches we talked about but again maybe I've added items all over the place you know ten twenty a hundred different items into the scope I've got them into my my cost model in order to get them into that Primavera schedule I don't have to start over all I've got to do is hit that Update button and it's going to push those new scope items into the Primavera schedule automatically for me okay so you see again it's doing that analysis looking at what's changed in this case what's changed is we've added some new scope and it's figuring out based on our rules you know where does that go in the Primavera schedule what coding needs to be applied are there any resources or costs that need to be pushed over and then as soon as we come back into Primavera there's that new scope ace and you can see what happens here with that new item goes into the Primavera schedule no Primavera doesn't quite know what to do with it other than where to put it in the structure it's assuming that it's going to start on the projects you know define start date but now at this point we could tie it in you know maybe that item needs to happen maybe it's going to happen after the let's say the machine excavation so I'll go ahead and choose that update the schedule and now you see that fall into place machine excavation is done it leads to that new scope so you know as we continue to estimate out that scope item build its duration you're going to see that bar get wider its cost will show up on the hard dollar side and on the Primavera side based on the resource loading in the cost loading okay last thing we'll take a look at and then we'll open it up for questions we kind of started down this path and looking at that cash flow one of the other things that we do with those those those durations and those those dates that we bring back from Primavera is we can look at resource utilization okay so let's take a look at some of the display settings on the hard dollar side right now you can see there's a lot of options on here right now we're only looking at a tiny bit of those things turned on let's you know right now we're looking at just cost and revenue if there's lots of other things we can look at in terms of let's you know once the project gets underway let's graph our as build costs as well let's graph our earn value we can even calculate finance costs for you based on surplus and and shortages of cost versus revenue we can graph each cost category and most importantly we can graph resource utilization so if we look over here and say yeah we want to look at our resource utilization on this graph how do we want to look at those resources we'll look at them by description we could also look at them by type or by code we'll just do it by description so I've got a list of all the the resources that are you know both in Primavera and an are dollar being shared so if we say let's see if we don't have anything turned on right now let's turn on our let's say our carpenters we'll graph those in gray let's go down and find maybe some other types let's turn on maybe a let's see what else we got here maybe like a general laborer maybe we'll graph that and blue and well and we'll graph those let's do those as bar charts is how we'll do those okay so now when we look at that graph not only do we see our cost in revenue on there now we can also see you know when do those resources start to come into place so when do we need those carpenters we can see how they're kind of up and down we can see those general labors that are kicking in in 2014 okay so obviously at this point you know we the beauty of this is we got visibility to all this information and as we you know we can do what if scenario is looking across both the hard dollar estimate and the schedule if we go back into those settings one of the other options that we can apply here is let's look at not only when those so for example the revenue that you saw as a green line on there let's not only look at when we earn the revenue but let's look at when we actually collect the cash so again playing the contractor role you can play it both ways as the owner or the contractor okay but as the contractor let's say we submit our our our payment request to the owner every 30 days and let's say it takes 30 days to get paid 10% self or retain it and we get that routine painted at the end of the job well now when I come back to cash flow if I turn on my revenue cash line now we're going to see the difference between when we earned the revenue and when we actually collected okay so you see that that green bar right there solid green bar is reflecting the the timing difference between when we earn the revenue and when we collected so if we zoom into that area right there you know we start earning revenue after that initial payment work earning it right here but we're not collecting it until way over here and we can do the same thing from a cost perspective to look at it when do we pay our subs when do we pay our vendors or again if we're the owner we can apply it in that direction in terms of you know when do we pay the contractor to look at you know what do we expect our actual cash outlay to be and ensuring that we don't you know go over our allocated budget okay so the last thing that all that I'll show you is just a glimpse of some of the some of the other forms inside the hard dollar menu we've really been focusing just on the cost breakdown structure and the cash flow we do have as I mentioned a quite a bit of options in here in terms of managing the whole project cycle everything from dealing with pay items and proposals in terms of generating tenders and bids soliciting quotes from from Saabs vendors choosing the the appropriate quotes and then into job tracking tracking variances against actuals tracking forecasts tracking estimates to complete and then you can see it's grayed out right here because we haven't started this project but then we also have a formal process for dealing with budget and contract changes as the project progresses and goes through its through its life cycle okay so a lot of a lot of value that we add around Primavera again sort of kind of before it and after it in terms of the estimate then Primavera handles the schedule in the middle and then on the other side we handle a project project management scope management change management forecasting and variances versus actual so with that let me go ahead and we'll turn it back over to to Brent I think our plan right now is we'll open up the mics and take any questions yeah well I got a couple of other questions that were typed in so if you do have questions please feel free to type them in the first question is how would you track progress on each activity actual work completed all right great question so there's a number of ways to do that let me let me point you to where you would do it if we came in here and said let's go ahead and go into job tracking for this project you can see right now in this case now we've got a different set of columns and there's hundreds of columns here to choose from as well we've got a few of them turned on so for example percent complete so in terms of adding progress or tracking progress I can do that through a data source okay so I can I can pull in that progress if you've got an Excel spreadsheet that you're using out in the field to track quantities if you've got it in a timesheet system those we can point to those data sources and bring them in that way or it could be as simple as you know you can do it right in a hard dollar if I go into that machine excavation item I can simply come down here and say okay let's say you know we started the work today and I want to put in a percent complete for that day's work or a quantity completed you can see this this project the quantity was fifty two thousand eighty three cubic yards so I can turn in a quantity if we did you know five thousand cubic yards today that backs into the percent complete okay or I can put in the percent complete maybe I'm using my best judgment I feel like we're ten percent complete that backs into the quantity well you must have done fifty two hundred units and then we can proceed to if there was a cost associated with that if we wanted to record resource hours or again import that actual cost from our financial system if we can also turn in man-hours here and we can see on this status view you know we've got thirty six hundred man-hours in the budget and this plan to date value here shows us you know for ten percent complete then we should have expended three hundred and sixty man-hours to date so if we put in maybe we spent four hundred man-hours you know the system is going to keep track of there's our as-built man-hours four hundred here's what we should have incurred three sixty right so work forty we've spent forty more man-hours or a percent more than we should have at this point just for that item and that's going to roll back into this this remain register here where we can look at that same kind of information across all the items whether we're looking at earned value and we of course could turn on columns to show you know actual man-hours verses expended man-hours forecast another may so hopefully that answered the question around progress I think it sounds like it went pretty pretty thorough with that the next question is how do you use the software to determine out of sequence activities which I think would probably happen on the p6 side yeah you know I don't know if you want to touch that one from the p6 perspective I know from you know from from hard dollars perspective we just we certainly bring back the start and finish dates you know in the hard dollar so you know back back on the CB s or on the job tracking register if we go to that view that has the dates on it you know we could certainly sort by start and finish date so we could sort on those fields and then start to look at or maybe let's look sort on the start date then you can kind of work your way down the list and see you know is this a logical progression but I think the majority of that sort of analysis you know is going to be done on the Primavera side yeah I agree with you on that that that will be done on the Primavera side the next question is are there any pre loaded cost databases available yeah absolutely in fact if I let me go back to maybe a picture's worth a thousand words here that view here kind of shows some of the databases that we support so we do we do have our s means available we do have richardson's available and then we also if you're under the mining sector we have a database from cost mine that any of those can be used and then we do have there's a number of other data sources that we've sort of helped customers who can we have a pretty flexible API where you can point to other data sources that may be proprietary to you or or maybe not as widespread as some of these others but but we we have a very open platform that allows us to you know reference or bring in price information from third-party sources okay so here the next questions kind of a detailed questions on detail question on how do you compare yourself to a full-blown cost system like an ecosystem of you're familiar with ego says we're a workover okay seems like our dollar can do a lot of these features looks like it may be simpler do you see these tools as competitors or just some overlapping functionality you know that's a great question they're there they are competitors but the overlap is fairly small so they're almost more like Primavera in terms of you know they're they're in the same space but they're there's not a whole lot of overlap so so for example you know something like an ecosystem over from Dell tech are really focused on sort of you know the cost management side earned value they both do a strong job at calculating hirin value but what they're missing the main difference between hard dollar and those two systems in particulars they're missing the the detailed cost model those two systems don't get into estimating they don't get into doing bottoms up you know resource driven cost models right so they approach it more from a financial standpoint you know we've got a budget already let's say now let's manage the budget where hard dollar really shines is leveraging all of those variables that went into the budget right so we know that the budget for something is a million dollars but we also know why it's a million dollars what crews what production rates what factors what Geographic influences so that you can change those and see the impact on the budget and then secondly those details really come in handy when you're doing forecasts so financial systems typically are going to approach forecasting from a purely arithmetic standpoint you know you which is frustrating often you get into scenarios where well we've lost you know we're 50 percent done with a scope item and we've lost a hundred thousand dollars compared to budget so well we must we're going to lose two hundred thousand by the time we're we're totally done with it you know so the systems will sort of interpolate where you're going to end up what hard dollar does we can do it that way that's an option but then we also have the ability to really apply your own judgment and those you know leverage those details it may be that you know the that's the way the budget was originally set up is we were going to have you know worse productivity in the first half of that item and better productivity in the second half which could be seasonal it could be learning curves you know those things can influence the forecast so you don't end up with these you know forecasts that are just based on math right you can apply some human judgment to that so I would say you know as a short summary the you know the biggest difference between higher dollar in those two systems eCos ascend Cobra is that we do have all the variables that go into the cost model not not just the budget itself to apply to to forecasting and change management and variance analysis and then I would also say that our integration with Primavera I think and I think generally Primavera will you know backs this up in terms of our integration is much more dynamic with with Primavera and in terms of there's a lot of configuration options and a lot of ways to control that interface but at the end of the day you know you see things going back and forth in a very seamless way and we really set the stage and sort of raise the bar on that back in 2006 and we've continued to expand on that integration we feel that's one of our core competencies great Brad thank you for that that was a great answer and I also agree with you on your point about the raishin between hard dollar and primavera I think it's a it's a really nice integration it's very thorough and it's it's a it's a integrations I've seen it's probably one of the best out there that I've ever seen so it's a really good integration the last question we have here is does it take that information and turn it into productivity in terms of quantities completed resources expended where are you limited to tracking it I earn value the quantity resources then can it be tracked by discreet time periods great question let's let's do let's take let's take that item where we've made an initial entry where after the first day we completed 10% let's let's make another entry and then we'll see how the system does turn that into productivity let's say maybe it actually started on Monday the 13th so we'll go back in time here a little bit whoops 813 so maybe we'll do let's say on that day we did let's say 5,000 units and maybe we spent maybe we actually spent more man-hours to achieve that smaller quantity maybe we spent 440 man hours let's say based on those entries of quantities and or percent complete along with the man-hours now we can calculate that let's let's do a duration here these were eight-hour days now we can look at productivity in a number of different ways in fact we'll graph it for you if I go into this productivity view here you can see this graph let's let's this these lines ended up very close together let's make a more disparate maybe we spent 600 man-hours on this one and we'll update that graph now I made a too dramatic and eight hours bear with me okay so what you're seeing in this graph and right here is where we can look at productivity so our planned production was you know forty three cubic yards per hour okay based on on durations let's look at this in terms of cubic yards per man-hour or man-hours per cubic yard okay now we've got a more a better view probably a more realistic view if you depends on how you want to look at productivity you want look at man our productivity or duration productivity in terms of days hours etc but here's the oh how many man-hours per cubic yard are we expending there's the plan the blue line point zero seven now we see you know as the work is progressing it's calculating an average production for us so far we're we're spending point one man-hours per cubic yard so we're forty percent below where we want it to be and then we also show the Green Line they're the most recent day that we did work we were at point zero eight man-hours per cubic yards so one of the things we try to do throughout the system is not only show you where you are but also show you which direction are you trending are we getting better are we getting worse in this case we're getting better right we're spending fewer and fewer man-hours per cubic yard as we go along here we're getting back to that plan this is this is the kind of detail I was talking about when we're trying to do a forecast you know if we just came over here and looked at the status and see that you know so far on our on our you know the man-hours we're over forty one percent over on our man-hours so far we might be tempted to just assume that same level of overage is going to continue for the rest of the way right but if we can see a view that looks like this now that tells us something we might assume now we're going to be maybe back to plan or maybe even better than planned and when you get into forecasting in hard dollar you got a lot of choices you can use what do we want to use to drive the pork so we wanted to use that average so far which is kind of the accounting or financial system approach or do we want to for the rest of the way let's assume we're going to be back to the to the budget or the plan or the what was in the current estimate or let's use that most recent value may be that the guys our crew is trained up there the learning curve is done and you know so the the performance we achieved yesterday is what we want to use going forward to do that forecast so hopefully that answers the question on productivity I mean you know hard dollars mission is all about cost and productivity so we we love getting questions about productivity that is you know one of the things that we can we can show you because we do have all those details not just the budget great well we one more question it is does hard dollar keep a log of all inputs or changes made to the project another great question absolutely I don't know whether I I turned that log on for this project but let's find out there's a little icon right here that allows us to look at changes and actually it does so I'm sure everybody remembers perfectly all the changes we've made today in this project so here's a little test for you you know as we look back at that changes log you can see it's been tracking for me who made the change what was the date and time the change was made what is it that changed you can see when remember we applied those difficulty factors for those two earthwork items so you know you can see her we changed you know from a one factor to a two factor and what did that do if we shorten this column up there you can see our difference column over to the far right right so applying that difficulty factor there you know increased our budget by four hundred and sixty one thousand dollars and you can look back through there are even changes that came back in from primavera that affected our finish dates and our start dates those are tracked in the log so we can see you know that change of when that I met job management and equipment item which is an overhead item because the finish date for the project when it moved from 2013 to 2015 that increased our you know overhead costs for that you know project managers and so forth by about you know thirty three thousand dollars we scroll over there you see that thirty three thousand dollar difference so all of the changes that you make whether you make them directly in hard dollar or whether they're coming in from Primavera do get trapped in this log you can also make notes if we go to a simple view here on our changes log you're gonna see the ability to make notes you can go back and make notes on each one of those changes just to you know sort of flesh out that audit trail to help you remember you know why did we make those changes we got one more question do you build your production and crew tables before you start a model or do you pull those in from an external source so the production and crew models can be you can actually go either way I would say most of our customers are going to build those in advance and keep them in our library so our library in fact I've done some examples here to show our security you can see some of these menu choices are turned off that's because I don't I don't have security to go in and change those master rates and that can be different well you might have what we call assemblies which are crews and and that's where you can kind of set up those models those crew models so you can have standard one storm in the library and then bring the relevant ones into each project into the forms of each project so you can see I have security to get into those in this project but I can't go in and mess with them in the library if I go into this project let's look at the crews in here and let's say you know here's a for example a concrete crew a small concrete crew we can see that it's a it's a four-person crew it cost 108 dollars an hour if I open that up it's gonna show me what's in that crew it's a you have two skilled carpenters two laborers you know if you can also have equipments in here and and then basically look at you know what's the relationship you know how many of these things do we need for this entire crew and then the production rate can be a factor of a lot of different things what's the geography what's the difficulty level you know where's the work being done those sort of things can impact the production rate which you know as we saw back on our cost breakdown structure if we go back into that machine excavation item you're gonna see where all of that comes together if we go into our production section so right now we dictated the crew productivity from the schedule you can see that red arrow is pointing to the hours so that's telling us that that duration came in from primavera or we just we directly typed it in okay but in other words we're working from the top down we had we got the duration in place that backed into the productivity we've got to do 694 yards a day if we're gonna get it done in 75 days the other way to go is from the bottom up if we know that this crew can only do you know four hundred yards a day right are we gonna see four hundred yards a day now that gives us a duration that calculates a new duration of 130 days thousand and 41 hours based on how many hours per day we're working and then that duration could be passed over to Primavera so that can go both directions the resources themselves as you saw do go back and forth between hard dollar and Primavera so these we can resource load this task with the hard dollar resources so you don't have to type them in twice okay and I guess the last thing based on looking at the question again the you know those crew productivity rates like the 50 yards per hour or 400 yards per day these things can all be imported from an outside data sources so if you have some tables maybe some production rates maybe from equipment manufacturers you can import those in you know to drive those productivity rates you can bring them in from our s means and then you might want to apply some factors to them like we did earlier so a lot of flexibility there and we one more question is there a report that can be used that represents a typical payment application yeah so I wouldn't I would say that I've not seen necessarily a typical one everybody kind of uses different formats you know in terms of how much detail do you want how much backup do you want is T and M work as a unit price work so a lot of different flavors of that but know that we do calculate what we call pay requests so as the work progresses back you know now that we put in some percent complete on this this job is unit price job we will probably see some earnings in here so if we look at that civil item and in terms of a pay request you know if we scroll over to the right now we should see here's some earn value starting to come in and now we should start to see some current revenue being calculated as well so you know earn revenue on that item million four hundred thousand so far and then we can go in and put in an accepted value if you know if we and the owner perhaps come up with a different number that we can bill then we can go in and and and record what is that earned value that we've accepted and then any remainder will show up in pending and we'll track you know what sort of unbilled so far so and most and we can do that by date so we can look at here's the first day that we calculated a payment request for this civil work it was back in July and at the time we'd only done a little bit of work right so if we were to do a new pay request that's gonna you see as I open that up see a new one on you typically you're gonna do it once a month every two weeks you know there you see a new row for each one of those so you know we do track the you know those earn revenue amounts that drive a payment request in terms of the you know report format we have a number of different formats that you can use we find a lot of customers kind of have their own templates for those and they're gonna take our our data that we've calculated and just drop it into those templates in Microsoft Word or or something along those lines so hopefully that answered that question great thanks Brad that that was the last question so it doesn't look like there anymore I just want to say number one thank you very much Brad that was an excellent overview of the integration it's very exciting it's a very it's as I mentioned before I think it's one of the best integrations I've seen and we're very excited about it also as far as this webinar went we had really a great number of very great questions I thought the questions were we're excellent I appreciate the questions from everybody that attended and if you do have any more questions please feel free to give us a call I also will probably be following up with you at some point within the next week just to see if there's any questions that you might have or any more information we can provide you if you look on the screen you'll see that's actually my contact information my phone number direct number as well as my email address feel free to contact me and I appreciate you taking your time and spending it with us this afternoon so thank you very much and enjoy the rest of the day take care Thank You Brad thank you

Channel: undefined

Views: 3,417

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: HardDollar, CDP, Oracle Primavera, project management, project budgets, project schedules

Id: XUQ53SgKa5U

Length: 62min 24sec (3744 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2012