Bid Center

If Virginia City is in Nevada, what's the Bid Center for?

Bruce Chezem — Wed, 31 May 2023 21:50:26 +0000

If Virginia City is in Nevada, what's the Bid Center for?

Bruce Chezem Wed, 05/31/2023 - 14:50

I can't get that theme song to "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" out of my head. And now it's in your head. You're welcome!

Seriously, now. Can anyone tell me how to use the Bid Center in Cabinet Vision? I'll bet my pointy toed boots that the Bid Center feature in Cabinet Vision is it's least used and most under rated feature.

I feel a bit of a rant coming on...

Just the name "Bid Center" is so wrong. The name "Bid Center" implies the feature will help you figure out a bid for a job...before you draw up the whole job. Is it just me? If you have to draw up the whole job before you can get good numbers out of the Bid Center, then why don't they call it the "Did you make any money on the job you built...Center". Because it's pretty darned good at giving you numbers AFTER you've drawn up a job. I know I'm speaking for you, too, when I say I would like to use the Bid Center for bidding and estimating before I have to spend hours and hours drawing up a house full of cabinets.

I didn't mean to get you all riled up there. The good news is that I've been noodling on this for quite a spell now and I think I got this Bid Center thing all figured out. I gotta a real nice solution regardless of the kind of cabinet business you run...commercial or residential. The Cost-Plus Bid Center data set add on for Cabinet Vision is an estimator's toolbox. At it's core, the Cost-Plus Bid Center is a collection of seeded rate tables and catalogs designed to help you build professional estimates and project reports. And it's exclusive to Cabinet Vision and the Bid Center. The beauty of the Cost-Plus Bid Center is you can use it today - right outta the box. Think about that for a spell. You don't have to set up the darn thing. You just install it and you can start producing estimates lickity-split. ( That means right now, for all you greenhorns )

I completely understand that, for the most part, commercial cabinet shops have a very different estimating workflow than residential shops do. And I completely understand that there are different kinds of estimates. For example, residential shops get asked all the time, "Can you give me a ballpark estimate to put cabinets in that house there?" And related to that kind of "estimate" is the "Hey, what's your price per linear foot for cabinets?". That's my personal favorite - NOT.

But can Cabinet Vision and the Cost-Plus Bid Center give me detailed, room by room, estimate of a flush inset job with white oak and shaker doors and dovetail drawers with crown molding and granite counter tops and ( I'm running out of selectors )... without drawing up the whole thing? Yep.

OK then...what if the darned customer changes their cotton-pickin' minds and they want flush overlay instead. Can Cabinet Vision and the Cost-Plus Bid Center do that? Yep, again! In about 3 seconds.

With the Cost-Plus Bid Center, you no longer have to spend hours or days drawing up a project to finally discover the price to bill a customer. And what happens if the client rejects your estimate...you've spent all that time drawing up the project.

Where the Cost-Plus Bid Center really shines is that it unleashes the power of Cabinet Vision's Bid Center to enable you to create complete estimates and project reports in minutes without first drawing up projects.

Commercial shops sometimes have estimating departments full of people pouring over blueprints and extracting every nuanced detail of a commercial project. It's tedious, stressful and time consuming. And, most often, the time spent on estimating is not billable time. With the Cost-Pus Bid Center, commercial shops no longer have to depend on third-party software or pages of spreadsheets to produce accurate, detailed commercial estimates. Using the Cost-Plus Bid Center can literally save you hundreds of hours of drawing time on those "Won Bids".

Residential shops on the other hand, especially custom residential shops, have a much more "sales-centric" approach to their estimating workflow. A customer for custom residential cabinets might go through several "rounds" of estimating before their contract is signed. There might be some sort of ball park estimate, and then another detailed estimate before the project is started. And there might be yet another estimate after the plans are drawn up. And, as the job progresses, there could be revisions based on change orders or new information. The Cost-Plus Bid Center gives you the tools to manage all of these estimating scenarios efficiently and quickly.

The Cost-Plus Bid Center is available for purchase now in the Craftsman Engineering online store. Have a look at this A Cabinet Vision Minute video about the Cost-Plus Bid Center.

Add new comment

Why is setting up Cabinet Vision for estimating so difficult?

Bruce Chezem — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 22:37:54 +0000

Why is setting up Cabinet Vision for estimating so difficult?

Bruce Chezem Mon, 11/29/2021 - 14:37

Bid Center

All of us in the cabinet industry have struggled with bids and estimates at one time or another in our careers. How do we provide consistent and competitive bids of our products without underbidding or overbidding and without spending hours tinkering with a spreadsheet?

I'm gonna get a lot of push-back about this blog topic but here-goes anyhow. This blog post discusses how I use Cabinet Vision for bidding and estimating commercial and residential cabinet projects. The kicker is that I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure in the cost of labor as it relates to producing bids and estimates using Cabinet Vision.

Wait! What? "But the price of cabinets is and always has been determined by adding the Cost of Materials + Cost of Labor + Overhead + Profit, right?" Yes, exactly. But let's not get bogged down in the most granular measurement of labor. Most of us are put off by the thought of calculating the labor cost of every piece of wood. It's a rabbit hole....a red herring...an endless and pointless exercise and I can't figure out how or where to capture all that labor. And therein lies the frustration of setting up Cabinet Vision for estimating cabinets.

But that's certainly what they taught us in Accounting 101 so that must be the "right way", right? If you think anything like I do, you've probably asked yourself, "How do I translate everything I learned in Accounting and apply that in Cabinet Vision?" And it's usually right about at that point that I used to shrink away from Bidding and Estimating in Cabinet Vision because I realized I didn't know how to apply basic accounting principles to the work that I did in cabinets. So I threw up my hands and put off trying to figure out Bidding and Estimating...again.

At some point, we've all been bogged down with trying to figure out ways to tally materials and labor and blah-biddy-blah. We've heard many methods passed down from shop owner to apprentice/young cabinetmaker like, "You gotta take the Cost of Materials, triple it and then add 10%. Then you take 5% as a down payment and then...". Good grief! And then he told me about walking to and from school in the snow....barefoot....uphill both ways!

Let's pause to regroup for a moment and ask ourselves "what are we trying to accomplish?" We want to use the Bidding and Estimating features in Cabinet Vision so we don't have to manually estimate every job using a spreadsheet and we don't want to manually re-estimate the project every time changes get applied to the job.

If you're using a spreadsheet system now, you're likely using some sort of linear foot pricing model as the base line of your bidding system. In the linear foot pricing model's simplest form, a total is derived by multiplying the length of a run of cabinets - in feet - by some number, X. For example, a run of 96" of base cabinets ( 8 feet ) is multiplied by $500 which gives us our example's total of $4,000. But, by the same token, you don't need a spreadsheet to use this very basic model.

And if you're using a spreadsheet, it's likely because your baseline linear foot price is much lower than $500 and you have lots of conditions, adjustments and add-ons to tack onto each cabinet. The style of doors...the species of wood...the finish of the cabinets...the number of drawers...the materials of the components...the type of hardware...and many other variables affect the price of cabinets.

And, if you're using a spreadsheet now, chances are that you can use the methods as a guide when you set up and configure Cabinet Vision's Bid Center Rate Tables. Cabinet Vision's Bid Center is incredibly flexible and extensible in it's internal architecture. Like just about everything else in Cabinet Vision, the Bid Center pricing models are defined by you, the user. Just like Construction Methods or Material Schedules or Drawer Schedules or Hardware Schedules, you can define a number of different Rate Tables and apply them to your jobs as necessary by selecting the appropriate rate table(s) by checking a checkbox.

Since Cabinet Vision and it's features are pretty tightly coupled with all the schedules and managers within the program, any changes you make to a job will be immediately reflected in the Bid Center as well. Let's say, for example, that your client wants to change from rift cut White Oak base cabinets to paint grade base cabinets. You would then change the material schedule for those base cabinets and make any changes to the shop drawings as necessary. If your rate tables are set up to reference the prices of the materials, the Bid Center will reflect the new material selections in the prices of the base cabinets.

Back in the day, just the sight of the word "Labor" anywhere in Cabinet Vision ( or Cabnetware ) kinda made me break out in a sweat. The "L-word" conjured up visions of time studies and stop watches and grumpy shop foremen and calculators and pert charts and....oh, the humanity! And I see that word everywhere in Cabinet Vision! Isn't there some way to turn off that word in Cabinet Vision?

But after years of deep immersion therapy, I've come to embrace the word of which we don't speak. While Cabinet Vision does give you the opportunity to drive yourself nuts with time studies and LEAN manufacturing principles and figuring out the labor used to edgeband a drawer box, you don't have to use that if you don't want to. But if you choose to use labor, knock yourself out.

If the Bid Center scares the "L" out of you like it did me, then maybe it's time to face your demons. Contact Craftsman Engineering now and find out how you can back away from the spreadsheet and take advantage of all the features of Cabinet Vision's Bid Center.