Ensure accurate project estimates every time using estimate templates and standard norms.
Mpower Project Planning and Estimating software helps projects improve profitability by using estimate templates, task lists, and standard norms across projects to ensure consistent estimates are produced every time regardless of who generates the estimate.
Leveraging Project Estimating Experience for Project Certainty
Project estimators have vast knowledge and experience in the fields and disciplines that they estimate. But having several estimators will still invariably produce discrepancies between estimates due to their individual experience. Ask five estimators to provide an estimate for the same scope of work and you’ll get five different answers. Standard norms can be used to calculate the hours, but the operations and steps to complete the work will also be different from person to person making estimate consistency between estimators difficult.
Key Challenges with Uncontrolled Project Estimating:
- Lack of quality control across estimates
- No standardization or alignment between estimates
- Labor-intensive process
Project Estimate Templates Improve Consistency & Accuracy
To help better align how estimates are created across different estimators, their collective knowledge can be leveraged to develop estimate templates, task lists, and a revision of standard norms that will be used across a project to increase the consistency and accuracy of estimates regardless of who generates them.
Once estimate templates are configured in Mpower’s Project Estimating software, standardized estimates can be easily generated and used to drive quantity, cost, and price budgetary values which can then be managed through the project lifecycle taking into account variations and change management.
Flexible options for creating estimate templates in Mpower mean templates can be created as simple task lists (e.g. SAP task lists) or as complex work templates with attributes added or excluded based on responses to integrated criteria.
And the result, generating estimates from estimate templates, ensures all operations, labor and material estimates are consistent in terms of structure, language and hours, regardless of who generated it.
Figure 1: Applying a complex estimate template based on defined criteria
Figure 2: Estimate template adds relevant operations and estimate structure based on answers to criteria
Figure 3: Standard norms selection for adding hours
Driving a Structured Project Estimate Approach
Ensuring each estimator adheres to your estimate template structure is key to improving your project success. Without a software platform to base comparisons with actuals (hours, cost and price) improvements to estimate accuracy will be difficult, if not impossible.
Using Mpower Planning and Estimating software, which can also be used to drive Mpower scheduling (at your chosen level) and Mpower time writing for collecting actuals, you will be able to close the feedback loop by validating the accuracy of estimates and adjusting them accordingly as well as providing insights into profitability.
Reusing the Detail
With all the effort going into building detail estimates for your project, it would be a shame not to re-use that detail. Mpower allows you to summarise the detail through your project levels to drive cost code estimates and budget definition. Not just at the start of the project but also generating the budget impact of captured change by using the variation designation against the planning and estimating elements.
Results to Results: More Accurate Estimates
Allow Mpower to help you define your estimate templates and use those templates to drive consistency across your estimators providing a solid platform for measuring the accuracy, utilizing feedback to increase profitability.
Benefits of Mpower Estimating Templates:
- Produce more reliable estimates using less man-hours
- Produce accurate estimates across estimators
- Apply consistent updates across projects
If you would like to see more of the Mpower Project Controls and Cost Management software in action, request a demo today.
Watch our Mpower demo to see how projects can improve the consistency and quality of estimates using Mpower's estimating templates and norms.
