“Any daily work task that takes five minutes will cost over 20 hours a year of productivity,“ says author, Anthony Stieber. “Even if it takes 20 hours to automate that daily five-minute task, the automation will break even in a year.” 

We understand that you have processes in place that you are used to, users that are resistant to change, and time that is counted in dollars and cents. If you could spend even a few minutes to automate something that could make you faster, stronger, and more accurate, think of how many hours in the day you could save and use towards growing your business.  

I’ve compiled some of our HCSS Academy and webinar resources below to guide you through your automation journey with the resources you already have.

Here are the top 5 ways to automate your day using HeavyBid:

1. Quote System Automation
   • Quote system will allow you to quickly populate your quote folders with resources and vendors based on the specific resources being used in the estimate.
2. DOT Import and Export
   • DOT import and export will open the possibility for you to quickly build estimates from DOT lettings vs having to manually create every line item.
3. Using Master Estimates to Automate the New Estimate Creation Process.
   • Master estimates provide the template from which you can quickly setup an estimate.  This will free up your time immediately to spend on estimating vs adding setups before you can estimate.  You will estimate faster, more consistently, and maintain a quality control point. Here is another helpful video.
4. Export Phases of Work and Budgets to Accounting
   • Our Export to Accounting allows you to automate the organization of your estimate, and quickly send the information to your accounting system for budgetary purposes. If you are sending your jobs to HeavyJob, it would be a great idea to use the Alternate Cost Code Field in the Activity Codebook to save a lot of time when conforming the estimate.
5. Let the Codebook Populate Your Bid with Known Activities and Resources
   • Codebooks contain the fundamental ingredients to your secret estimating sauce.  These codebooks will automate building biditems, with cost, utilizing repetitive activites or sub work.

Here are the top 5 ways to automate your day using HeavyJob:

1. Time Card Warnings
   • The manager system can set preferences to alert foremen/field entry personnel when their time card is missing required items: Did I enter quantities? Did I enter my break? Did I add a diary?  Let the system catch these errors before they are sent in to the Manager, and reduce the need for error checking by humans. 
2. Drive Your Pay Estimate Quantities
   • Instead of having a side spreadsheet, mark your driving cost codes for pay estimates to automate gathering of the pay estimate quantities from what is already entered in HeavyJob.
3. Forms Auto-Emailed When Sent
   • You can manually send forms by e-mail or you can set up a form to automatically e-mail certain addresses every time a time card is submitted to the manager system.  This will ensure that the right people see specific forms as they are coming through without extra effort. 
4. Run Tasks Overnight to Keep Setups Current
   • If your pay classes are the same for all jobs, setting up a nightly task to bring library setups into active jobs would keep your foremen up to date when they are looking for new employees. If you have DIS integration from accounting, running this in the evening will keep you from having to key in your new employees twice.
5. Databound Forms Pull Data From Time Card
   • Automatically populate your time card data into forms that the manager creates. These forms can turn a tedious task of filling out a complicated report into just a few clicks.

If you love to stay ahead of the curve, there is a monthly HeavyJob Webinar on the last Thursday of every month at 10 am CST. This webinar is hosted by a panel of Product managers and industry experts that offer tips, feature explanations, and a chatty Q&A session that will take your Job Management to the next level. Register HERE to be notified. 

We want to save you time with HeavyBid and HeavyJob by relieving your daily routine from repeatable processes.  Once you let the computer handle those repetitions, you can get back to the real work of creatively winning jobs and saving money along the way.  Whether your goal is expansion, being able to predict cost and profit, monitoring progress and execution to increase job efficiency, or achieving company alignment – we want to be on that journey with you, and provide you with the support that you need to keep going.

If you have any unique ways you are automating your workflow that is saving your company time and money (or maybe just a little sanity), and want to share that with others – please send me an e-mail: daniel@hcss.com.

• If you are the self-taught kind of person that likes to research as much as you can before you ask for help, we made a library of all of our support solutions that you can access here.

• If you are the kind of person that likes to chat online, and you need help there is a chat link within each of our applications, or you can simply click here.

• If you are trying to find something, and has taken you longer than 5 minutes – give us a call; we can help: Main Support: 1-800-444-3196