Setting up Est-Duct

[Brian]

I am currently setting up Est-Duct on a shared network setup. We have CADduct;CADMECH;CAMduct;ESTDUCT all sharing the database on the network.

I have some general questions about the Est-Duct interface:

#1: Is there a way to switch to a different service using the takeoff template?

#2: During some takeoff testing my material jumped from galvanized to black iron....Is this a setup issue?

#3: Also, during some takeoff testing with the digitizer the oversized part dialog kept coming on.....I know the CAM guys want this, but the Estimators just find it annoying. Is there a way to have this be an option in MAPUSER.exe ?

#4: While using the digitizer and taking off some items that have multiple items behind  the button controlled by different conditions Est.-Duct does not seem to accept the conditions. It just has me pick the one I want from a dialog. Is there a setting that I have wrong? It works in CAD.

#5: It appears that "Item Dimensions List" is what is used for the quick takeoff.......Some of these are fabrication type fields such as collars, extensions, etc. that an estimator does not need to deal with. Is there a way to suppress some of these fields? (Trying to optimize the takeoff as much as possible.)

[Admin]

From an email I received from Jim Reis (TSI)...

In the US we are selling more and more Estimating products and many of our users have asked if XtraCAD could include the EST-Duct and EST-Mech on the user forum of XtraCAD.  I know that it was on the site for a while.  I´m asking on behalf on the users if you can add a section in your forum that includes EST-Duct and EST-Mech.  Thank you

It would appear that not as many users as he indicated require this forum according to the response so far  

[Jabbster]

Gruel,
FYI, we bought Est-Duct a year ago, still haven't implemented using it. We had a bummer of an install/training experience, & never got past that. We are considering giving it another try, don't know whether we will or not... Anybody want to purchase ours??? Send an email if interested in trade or purchase.

Ours is also on a shared network database. I question the idea of letting the Estimators have full access to our working database. I think they should have a service template that is a condensed & simplified version of the CAM & CAD templates. (Kind of what your note # 5 states.)
Hopefully I can add to this topic soon. But for now, as Don said, Patience

[David]

There have been many changes an improvements to estimating and in particular the way services work in the last year or so. Many of those changes will be in the next release, with even more in the pipeline after that.

Some changes in particular in the next release may be relevant to your requests:

#1: Is there a way to switch to a different service using the takeoff template?

You can now setup your template to change to a fixed service name - you would need to add a keystroke template area that performed the shortcut "ctrl+I' to give the service box the focus and then contained the service name to switch to.
eg. Ctrl+I, S, U, P, P, L, Y

#2: During some takeoff testing my material jumped from galvanized to black iron....Is this a setup issue?

This shouldn't happen unless the item being taken off does not have a specification valid for galvanised, so it is switching the material to black iron, which is valid. You need to look into your setup closely and try and work out when it happens. Are you taking off free entry items ? there were some bugs that carried over materials from free entry items to template items but they should be fixed now.

#3: Also, during some takeoff testing with the digitizer the oversized part dialog kept coming on.....I know the CAM guys want this, but the Estimators just find it annoying. Is there a way to have this be an option in MAPUSER.exe ?

There is now a new section of the database "local settings" where each user can force some settings, like whether to Auto Oversize, to be stored locally instead of using the shared settings.

#4: While using the digitizer and taking off some items that have multiple items behind  the button controlled by different conditions Est.-Duct does not seem to accept the conditions. It just has me pick the one I want from a dialog. Is there a setting that I have wrong? It works in CAD.

EST-Duct now support conditions fully and should behave exactly like CAD in that respect.

#5: It appears that "Item Dimensions List" is what is used for the quick takeoff.......Some of these are fabrication type fields such as collars, extensions, etc. that an estimator does not need to deal with. Is there a way to suppress some of these fields? (Trying to optimize the takeoff as much as possible.)

The only way at the moment is to lock those dimensions off on the item file. This does mean that you can't share those items with other users that need them though. We are looking into possibly implementing separate locks for CAD, CAM and EST users on the same item file's dims (in the future) - would that be useful to you ?

[VirtualPilot]

I am currently setting up Est-Duct on a shared network setup. We have CADduct;CADMECH;CAMduct;ESTDUCT all sharing the database on the network.

I have some general questions about the Est-Duct interface:

#1: Is there a way to switch to a different service using the takeoff template?

#2: During some takeoff testing my material jumped from galvanized to black iron....Is this a setup issue?

#3: Also, during some takeoff testing with the digitizer the oversized part dialog kept coming on.....I know the CAM guys want this, but the Estimators just find it annoying. Is there a way to have this be an option in MAPUSER.exe ?

#4: While using the digitizer and taking off some items that have multiple items behind  the button controlled by different conditions Est.-Duct does not seem to accept the conditions. It just has me pick the one I want from a dialog. Is there a setting that I have wrong? It works in CAD.

#5: It appears that "Item Dimensions List" is what is used for the quick takeoff.......Some of these are fabrication type fields such as collars, extensions, etc. that an estimator does not need to deal with. Is there a way to suppress some of these fields? (Trying to optimize the takeoff as much as possible.)

We have been battling with EST/CAD/CAM now for 9 months, welcome to the obscure world of MAP....from our experience with these programs....

1. I switch to different services via Screen and Mouse, seems to be quicker than having to program buttons for the 20+ services we have...

2. We just now also realized that the program has a bug that makes the material jump, in our case, it was jumping, say, from Stainless Steel to Galvanized, but I did notice that it was doing it every 4 fittings...guess what...we had the AutoSave option set to 4...unchecked that option and the problem went away...almost...now, every time we hit SAVE, it still reverts back to Galvanized, so if you trust your electric company, you can take off an entire job without hitting save and not have the program revert to a different material...

3. Regarding the oversized part showing up, yeah, we have the same problem too, our CAM side need this so that they can catch oversize fitting and change the segmenting manually, if they let the program do it automatically, we get extrange cuts in some of the fittings, like a straight thru cut line cut in elbows gores cut...

4. This could be caused by several factors, we have several fittings too that change type depending on sizes and it works for us in CAD and EST...

Don't despair....keep posting....in the 9 months or so we have been configuring these programs to work the same way we work, I'll say we are probably 70% from the goal of having it exactly like we would like it to be....

[Jabbster]

David & Santos - Good information. Thanks

[Brad Moore]

Our Estimating Department is looking at switching from Estimation to either Quickpen's Estimating or CAD-Est.  Right now they like the QP product better.  There is talk that if they select QP, upper management may also require us to switch our CAD to QP.  I don't want to do that.  The best way for me to head this off is to try to show how wonderful CAD-Est is.  Based on this bunch of posts it doesn't look good.  Does anyone have any positive feedback on CAD-Est?
Thanks,
Brad

[Brian]

Brad, since my original post we have had several beta updates and are moving right along. I think that in the next week or so when the next release gets published your estimators would be very impressed.

[cbodwin]

Brad,
Does you company just do cad and estimating or does it go into the cam?  Is your company a design build contractor?  If your company does all of this than I would ask why not go with the est-duct?  The advantages that you have over quick pen is that all the departments within you company would be using a shared database and all cad drawings and material sent thru cam could then be easily costed thru est duct at any time during the project.

Also with staying with the one platform there would only be one database to maintain.  We have been using the CADduct for some time now and implemented the Cam, and Est within the last year.  We too have estimators that use QP religiously and show resistance to Est-Duct.  What we do at certain points during detailing is to print our estimating reports to show where we are actually at in regards to costing and then compare that to what the estimators have done with QP.  Now that the estimators are seeing how easy it is to takeoff from CAD and CAM with EST they are starting to head towards the light.

[Brad Moore]

Thanks guys.  I will pass this information along; hopefully it will help our cause.  Yes, we are a Design Build Contractor and we do send right to CAM, so I agree, CAD-Est is the only way to go.  I just have to help our Estimators see it that way.
Thanks again,
Brad

[thodge]

We have always encountered weight differences between EST and CAM reports. We noticed that this difference seemed to be greater when there was liner on the particular take-off. When our EST was setup, no weight was assigned to any liner material because we price it by the sq. ft.. We have now assigned all of our liner material a weight of .0001 pounds per sq. ft. When we did this, all of our material weights now reflect only metal weight. We varified this by multiplying area from the report by the weight per sq. ft. of each metal gauge. Has anyone else experienced this problem, and is there another fix?

[scg]

The company I work for has been in the process of implementing Est-Duct (we currently use CAD/CAM) for around 6 months now and although we are getting close we are still finding some issues.  One of these issues is finding an accurate break out between fitting duct (plasma burned) and straight duct (off the welty-  uses a  60" sheet so an 18" piece of straight duct should not be added into this weight).  We have been told design line will correct this issue and give us a much more accurate breakout.  
Are any of you currently using design line?  How was the implementation, and are you happy with the fuctionality it provides?