From Zero to Hero: Streamlining Estimating with ProEst

ARIEL CASTILLO: Welcome, everybody, to Autodesk University 2023. I'm really happy and excited to be joining this year with a presentation that's called From Zero to Hero: Streamlining Estimating with ProEst. Today I'm joined with Richard from Autodesk and Stu from Miller-Davis Company. And we're happy to share our process journey with a technical demonstration of the platform as well.

So my name is Ariel Castillo. I am Innovation Manager at Miller-Davis Company. I've been in the industry since 2010. And I've been with Miller-Davis for the last four years, where we've been doing a lot of innovation and reviewing our workflows in order to implement digital tools that can make us more efficient and that can enhance the way that we spend our day-to-day on the job sites and at the office.

Just to take it on a personal note, I have a couple hobbies that are related to adrenaline. I love flying, skydiving, and sailing. And I like to joke that my superpower is mind reading, which works sometimes, not all the time. But I mean, it's cool when it does. All right, Richard, take it.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Thanks a lot, Ariel. My name is Richard Antczak. I am an Implementation Consultant at Autodesk. That just means that I train folks on using the tools that we build here.

I'm focused on the construction sector. My background is in construction. You can see a great photo of me here with a lot longer hair. This photo is towards the beginning of my career where I was working a lot in the field.

I moved from there into the office. Spent about 11 years in the field and the office before coming over to Autodesk. Been here for a little over a year. While I was in construction, I got to work on some cool projects, theme parks, zoos, aquariums, and a lot of hospitality kind of projects. So it's been a pleasure to teach folks some tools that I wish I had in my past.

And my hobbies is, on the side, I like to-- I'm studying Japanese and try to practice gymnastics with really low skill level. Same with writing. But in that same line, my superpower is telling silly, made-up stories to children.

STU WILLIAMS: Hi. My name is Stu Williams. I'm an Assistant Estimator at the Miller-Davis Company. I've been with Miller-Davis for a little over a year and a half now and have been in the estimating department for about a year. My background was predominantly in manufacturing and engineering before. So I really learned to love standardizations and well-defined procedures.

A couple of my passions include hiking, traveling, and gardening. And my superpower is the power of persuasion.

ARIEL CASTILLO: All right, thank you, Stu and Richard. Now let's talk a little bit about Miller-Davis. We are a 100 plus year company. And we're focused in construction management, general contracting, and we also do some self-perform services like concrete, steel, among other trades.

We are headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If you ever come to the states, we're going to be on the West side of the state. Really beautiful when it's summertime, and if you like snow, there's going to be plenty here around winter time. And we've been also awarded with National Safety Award by the AGC for the last 14 years.

We do a lot of work in the commercial side, industrial, education, and government. Biggest focus, I will say, is K12 and also higher education. Now let's geek out and let's talk a little bit about our background and challenges and how we ended up with ProEst.

Now, as part of my job description, something that I love to do is identifying where our employees are suffering from their day-to-day activities. That's what we call here pain points. And I like to review them. And it's part of our company practice to sit down with the employees in different departments and try to understand what they struggle, what they do on a daily basis, and what could be improved.

Now when we talk about pain points, there's two types of pains. We have mosquito bites, which are very simple and something that if a mosquito bites you, you can basically-- you're just going to move your hand around, not a lot to do there.

But the other type of pain is when we have a shark bite. A shark bite is painful, and it's something that you immediately need to go to a hospital because if you don't do it, then, I mean, it's game over, right?

So how do we relate this pain point? How do we talk about mosquito bites and shark bites? Well, for us, estimating was a shark bite. We were actually suffering on the way we were doing estimates. The way that preconstruction was handled was also very difficult. And we needed to find a solution.

Now to explain a little bit about that pain point, I would like to show you what our original workflow looked like. So basically, we would get documents from a client, right? And this client would provide us all the information they had. There could be drawings. It could be specs. And this will allow us to understand the project a little bit better.

And we would take that information, and we would take it over to Excel. In Excel, we would create the project, we'll start drafting what we needed. And then we will take that information and we'll move it into what we had before, which was called On-Screen Takeoff.

Now On-Screen Takeoff allowed us to do the takeoffs and get the measurements from the drawings. We would move that to our old estimating tool. And then when we were done with that, we would take a report. Although, that was not true because the reports from the old system we were using were not as good. So we will take those back to Excel.

Where we were in Excel, we would probably find that there was an issue or a mistake. And then we would have to go back to On-Screen Takeoff. And then from On-Screen Takeoff, we would take it back to MC Squared to get the new quantities.

Oh, but wait. There's probably new drawings coming up. So we would take those drawings and we'll have to put them inside On-Screen Takeoff again, which we will have to take the quantities again into MC Squared. And then we will finally put it into Excel.

Oh, but wait, there's more drawings coming in, which we need to take it back to On-Screen Takeoff. We need to then take them to MC Squared. And then we will-- it was a mess. That's the summary.

I don't even know where we'd be right now, honestly, because this took so many steps, so much back and forth. And that was definitely a pain that we were going through. That is what our original workflow looked like. And that presented a lot of challenges.

This is where our shark bite was basically, right? We had a lot of scattered data. It was difficult to find the information we needed. There was no source for all this information. We had a siloed environment. And then we had too many tools that we could use.

So in order for us to move away, we made a wish list. This is what we were looking for. We wanted a tool that was cloud-based that allowed our team to be able to access their tools no matter what they are or which device they're using.

We wanted to make sure that this platform was managing data in a structured way, that it allowed teams to collaborate in real-time, that it was a one-stop shop. So, no multiple tools. We wanted to make sure we're doing everything in just one tool. And we wanted to make sure that there was a lot of integrations available for this app.

And that's how we ended up with ProEst. Now, there's nobody better in this conversation than Richard to address what is ProEst.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Thanks, Ariel. I'll do my best. So in summary, ProEst is a database-driven preconstruction system that is a platform, which can be accessed by multiple users at one time. We create customized cost sources in ProEst that serve everything from labor to equipment to even material cost sources that can change per location. But it puts all those functions together that Ariel pointed out. Document takeoff, cost estimating, and reporting all happen in one place so that when you need to change a takeoff close to the end of your bid, you can make that update and the cost is reflected and then it can go out to your proposal.

So that's the summary. We'll go into some more detail here. And I like to think of the database in ProEst as the heart of the value there. I see it as a bunch of engineered parts that can have a lot of different character. But you make decisions about them ahead of time.

You store those parts in the database, something like a bunch of LEGOs. You can fit these together. And you can create multiple outputs from these common building blocks that any company is going to use over and over.

And I think this is going to be the last spreadsheet we show you guys today. So bear with us. This is an example of our import template that we use to take a customer's data from Excel or Sage Timberline or MC Squared, like Ariel mentioned, convert that into a simple list of lines.

Each of those rows can have character that's going to allow it to be estimated more quickly in takeoff. You can set productivity rates and material factors. You can set specific folder groups that are going to organize it in a way that's going to make it easier for everyone to find.

And you can see those columns as the basis for a set of folders that we're going to group it roughly in the CSI format. It does change with some customers that don't use CSI. But this example here is by divisions first, then subdivisions, which is just a parent folder and a subfolder within which a bunch of items live. So all those LEGOs are living within these folders that you set up based on what your company-- how they want to find them.

Just have one more analogy about the database for you guys that, one way to see it is that we've got a set of shelves that we can organize our bins and subfolders. Within those, we're going to store our LEGOs. And that's going to allow us to organize that information with different accounting codes or different cost groups for operating budgets so that once those are included in an estimate, you're done with that estimate, you can actually just click a button and it's going to go directly into a grouping that makes sense to the other parties in your company or make sense to a customer that has a particular bid form that you always need to fill out for that customer. So we can make a lot of those decisions ahead of time and label them as we need.

So to put a bow on this, the goal with ProEst, starting with that database, create these engineer components up-front, make those decisions ahead of time so that you're closer to the end when you start an estimate. And from those LEGOs, you create some handy outputs. One could be an operating budget. One could be a proposal to a customer.

Another might be a really high-level executive summary just for a gut check to know that you've got enough money in general conditions compared to how much labor you have in the job. And you can create those outputs quickly and pass those off to the other folks that need them right away.

ARIEL CASTILLO: Thank you, Richard. So now that we understand ProEst, let's talk a little bit about Miller-Davis Company journey and how we went from zero to hero and run this implementation.

So basically, here you have an overview of our timeline. We got introduced to ProEst at Advancing Preconstruction in June of 2022, which is a great conference that we attended. We were able to meet part of the staff there. We talked a little bit about what we wanted to do. And that allows us to coordinate and get into a demo.

Now this demo, we were able to sit down with multiple folks from the company and make sure we reviewed how the system worked. We really liked it. We had a discussion internally. And we signed a contract as soon as October in 2022.

Now we sat down. We talked about that kickoff, how we were going to implement ProEst. We did that in November. We did a company-wide training in January. And by March 2023, we were able to complete our first client facing ProEst estimate, which was a milestone for us. We were able to celebrate because we got that job, so it was really, really amazing.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Man, that seems pretty straightforward, Ariel. Did it really go pretty smooth just like that?

ARIEL CASTILLO: Well, now that you bring it up, the reality is that the kickoff was overly simplified when I talked about our timeline. And this took a lot of work. In reality, this is a small box, as you can see here. But if we dive in, we'll see that there was a lot of work going behind the scenes. And I think you're the best one, Richard, to address this.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: All right, I'll take it. I know, guilty as charged. I try to set up a good parallel path for us at the beginning, starting with Miller-Davis. Our implementation strategy started with knowing that they've got a lot of data to migrate out of an existing system, but also knowing they've got a pretty big preconstruction department. And they're going to be bidding work constantly.

So we created two tracks for implementation, where we had one team that would meet periodically to look at data migration work, moving things over into ProEst, while the other team could get started with the basics. And our migration efforts would try to keep up with them so that when it was time for them to do an estimate to practice, there was some meaningful data in there for them to work with.

And so we created some milestones along the way, just how we would leaf in the migration meetings alongside the estimating meetings. That gave us some points to hold to as we went from the early fall into the winter to try to get to that first estimate there in March. And here's just a few dates in here that took us along the way. But eventually, we ran out of migration tasks and we could focus completely on estimating, and then spaced out our meeting some more so that we were just checking in to see if anything had come up while we were working.

ARIEL CASTILLO: Now the question that we will naturally ask is, we had a great plan for that implementation. So did we hit every milestone? Yes.

STU WILLIAMS: Ariel, be honest.

ARIEL CASTILLO: I mean, yes, just not within our aggressive schedule. So one thing that we did is we underestimated the amount of work that needed to be done in order to get this up and running. Now, on the flip side, the takeaway that we got is that a good implementation requires time and commitment.

It really took a lot of meetings. It took a lot of decision-making and energy, just making sure that we were motivated to do this and that we were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And today, every time we win an estimate, we get a job, it's awesome because you can see how the team celebrating, just like you can see here, one of our team members just using a confetti cannon just to celebrate a win.

So part of the team is always happy to share the feedback. Here is Jack Abate, the VP of Construction Operations, saying that ProEst has streamlined our process, allowing us to produce more accurate estimates, resulting in more wins. And then we have other folks just saying that nothing like collaborating in real-time. The data is accessible, regardless if you are an intern or an executive, and that there's a more systematic approach, which brings standardization to the company.

Now with that said, I think it's time for us to get our hands dirty and jump right into the demo, which Stu is going to take over. He's going to show us how to run a project on ProEst.

STU WILLIAMS: Thank you, Ariel. First thing I have to do will be to open a web browser. All right, so we're going to open our preferred web browser, preferably, Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. And then you will simply just go into proest.com.

So you will log into your account using the email that you used to register. And it will take you into your company's home page. And the home page is a very helpful tool. It displays a lot of information that is also quite customizable.

So for instance, we have here, Tasks and Events. These are tasks and events that are assigned to me as well as open estimates and dollars associated with those estimates. So this is a bit of a one-stop shop where you can see the progress of all of the estimates within your company.

And so I'm going to look at the menu here on the left and move down into the Calendar. And again, the calendar, it's a very nice visual guide for upcoming tasks and events. You can view it through month, week, day, however you like. But another nice feature with the ProEst calendar is we can actually sync it to our preferred calendar.

So if you have a calendar that you use for work, you can sync it to that. And you will receive email notifications for upcoming tasks, upcoming bid deadlines, many things through ProEst.

The next menu item I'd like to touch upon is the Task List. The task list is just a much more concise view of upcoming tasks and events. You can also add new tasks. In doing so, you just assign a due date, a brief description. You can also assign the task to a specific person, as well as assigning these tasks to specific estimates, which we will see later on.

The next menu is the database. Like Richard said, this is the heart of ProEst. A lot of information lies in here. And Miller-Davis, we chose to get the database through ProEst through BNI.

But the database is very manipulatable. You can edit it you can add items that you want that may not exist in the database that you get from ProEst. And the nice thing is when you add these items directly to the database, they are saved in the database.

So you don't have to create the same item for 18 different estimates 18 different times. You can create it once. It's saved. And you can use it from there on. You can see here that--

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Didn't you guys have a good bit of custom items that you brought into the data set that had come with ProEst from the BNI cost book?

STU WILLIAMS: Yes, we had put in quite a few items that we self-perform using the import feature that Richard showed earlier. And so we save it through the series of divisions and subdivisions. And you assign a code, a brief description of what that item is, the unit for that item, as well as costs. So I'll show more about that later. But you can edit item costs in here as well.

And then another big time-saver with the ProEst database, we actually have assemblies. So if you were to go into an Assembly, assemblies are just a mix of different items that work in tandem to decrease the amount of time you actually do at takeoff. So let's take a look at one really briefly.

Here we are in a beam for concrete. So we see here a common variable here is grade beam length. It appears in several different items. But because we're using the same variable in all of these items, we only have to do the grade beam length takeoff once. And that value is applied to all of these, saving a lot of time.

I think next-- I will touch upon reports later-- let's step into the Estimate Center. So the Estimate Center is where projects, past and present, reside.

Nice thing, we can actually toggle filter however you want so that it's not entirely cluttered. So you can filter based on projects. You can filter based on your client. You just have to fill that in. So from here, we can also add a new estimate just by clicking on this.

In the interest of saving time, I'm going to make an estimate using a template that we have set up. So I'm going to come down here to Copy Estimate and start typing in the template name. Now, you can copy whatever estimate you want. It doesn't have to be a quote unquote, "template."

But just like magic, it pulls in drawings. It will pull in predetermined items, as well as other project-specific information that you want to carry over. So I'm going to fill in some required information here. And I'm going to give a description.

We'll change the estimate type here to historic preservation. Estimate status is good. Let's change the due date. I will change it to October 31 at 12:30 in the morning, which is the witching hour. Very appropriate here.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Picking up the pattern here, Stu. Got magic, witching hour, historic preservation. Let's see what we got in here.

STU WILLIAMS: It's leading up to a big reveal. So we're going to look up here at these menu items as well, these little tabs up here. So we're in Estimate Setup right now.

We can move over into Team, which is where we can assign collaborators for these projects. They will receive email notification that they have been invited. And they're able to work in the estimate on ProEst at the same time as yourself. So it's very collaborative.

I'll move into Contacts. So Contacts is essentially where we can add exterior personnel, somebody from outside of your own organization. This comes from the Relationships tab. And it's beneficial for reports or for a point of contact.

So I'm going to select here, Minerva McGonigal as a contact relationship for this project. But I will mark her as my client as well, which is also beneficial for outputting reports.

So next, we're going to look at the site. It's your basic project location. Again, beneficial for reports. But the more information you can put into the estimate, it's more complete.

And then I'm just going to quickly look through Scope. You have Inclusions, Exclusions, as well as Payments. These four tabs are just notepads. But again, if you have information that you want to share with your team, you want to store it with your estimate, making notes is very beneficial.

The last tab here is called Custom. What resides in Custom are custom fields. So we have the opportunity, the ability, to create a custom field that if you aren't able to put something in that was previously mentioned in any of the other setup tabs, you can create a custom item. It will be stored in the Custom tab. And then you can fill it in however you'd like.

And with that, setting up the estimate is now done. And I will save it.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Now jumping in here, I think, Stu, we better just jump over to the takeoff. I think for all our viewers here, we put together an example here that's a pretty high-profile project, the one that Miller Davis was invited to attend that's pretty cool. Some of you guys may recognize the building. I think a lot of you will.

So go ahead and enter the takeoff area there, Stu. And let's show everyone what we're working on. We'll come back to--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

STU WILLIAMS: This is a historic moment for the company.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: So this right here is, if anyone recognizes, none other than the Hogwarts castle school of witchcraft and wizardry. This year, they're undergoing this massive renovation that the Ministry of Magic typical contractors are just overrun, so one of the first times, they're reaching out to non-magic participants. And they've asked for Miller-Davis's help to do some of the historic preservation finishes because they do that all day long in the greater Michigan area.

And so we're going to do our best to do some takeoff here. And it's a good example. We've got a few preengineered parts that we can show to you guys. So, take it away, Stu, and let's see what we got.

STU WILLIAMS: All right, so let's take a quick look up here at the toolbar that we have in our takeoff. We have a cursor, a select cursor. Measurement, this is what we have to-- this is what will be selected when we are performing takeoffs. One of my personal favorites-- it's a life-saver-- the Undo button, undoing a mistake, very beneficial.

Finally, here we have a scale where we can set a predetermined scale. Typically, it will be either US customary system or the metric system or we can set a custom scale, which we had to do on this project. These drawings are very old. And we're not sure if the Wizarding World actually uses metric or the imperial system.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: I looked it up. It's actually like 1,000 year old castle. That's the story.

STU WILLIAMS: Well, these windows are definitely over 1,000 years old. And they could use some love. So we're going to do a takeoff to restore these here. And I'm going to hit the item that I want to perform the takeoff.

Once it's highlighted in blue here, I know that I've got it. And then it becomes a fun little game of point and click. It's like a classic video game but without carpal tunnel.

But if you accidentally make a mistake like happens, oh, so often, we have the Undo button. Now the Undo button only undoes the very last click. So there are other options to remove items.

If you would like them gone, you simply go to the Cursor. You can select the item that you want deleted. And then using your Delete key on the keyboard, you can delete that way, or select the item, right click on it. It brings up this nice pop-up menu, and we can delete it from here.

So the next thing, in order to finish my takeoff, that I have to do will be to take off the granite fireplace in the Slytherin dormitory. So I'm going to scroll through the pictures until we can find that. As we are here in the Great Hall, I'm going to continue looking through.

Here is the dining Hall, perhaps my favorite building in the entire campus. Here we have just some stained glass windows. Yes, Dumbledore's office. And finally, we are here at Slytherin's granite fireplace.

So I'm going to do my takeoff for the granite fireplace. You may see here that this is actually the assembly that we are talking about. So it will be calculating multiple different items at once. So I'm going to click on stone area. And very similarly to my window takeoff, it is just a game of point and click.

A big difference, though, between an area and a linear takeoff versus an each takeoff, you'll see that the takeoff sticks with the cursor. In order to stop that, you just double-click, and now my cursor is free. To finish up this takeoff, I'm going to do a lovely bull nose detail in the stone like so.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: While Stu's doing that, I'll just point out that like that assembly we looked at for the grade beam, we're putting in only a couple measurements here for these features. But it's going to be counting multiple items that we'll see when we jump into the estimate sheet. This will allow the estimator to just calculate all the mortar on any prep work that needs to happen for this finish, as well as the material for the stone just by those couple of clicks. So that's kind of the spirit of that exercise.

STU WILLIAMS: I'm going to move into the Estimate tab up here. And you'll see that all of the line items that we have in our estimate, they appear en masse all together. Items that are highlighted in red, that's just a friendly reminder that it is wrong, that it's missing information. So it needs to be complete.

I'm going to use a nice feature that ProEst has in the Estimate tab, the Grouping. Groupings allow you to view the information in ways that make sense. So I would like to set it up for assemblies, that way I can see my fireplace. And I'm also going to use the Expand All button.

And here, we can see, here is my fireplace. And here is my window. So I've got eight windows and over $2,800 for my window work. That sounds a little expensive, so I'm going to take a look at what the cost is coming from.

So I'm going to come over to Edit. And here is the information for this specific item. So a nice feature here we have is actually the labor.

Let's see. We have our labor type-- a very specific labor type. I hear their skills are quite legendary. Let's take a look at what that is. These labor types are predetermined. And we can use them from estimate to estimate.

Yes, so we have a traveling centaur that had to come out of the zip code. So that would explain the expense. Now--

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Is that a union rate there, Stu?

STU WILLIAMS: That would be the union rate. But there is no conflict in the unions. We had that dispute earlier. And fortunately, it was resolved.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: So we better make sure we get them covered for travel. I don't even know what they eat.

STU WILLIAMS: That would be a good question. And I would suggest throwing a contingency in at the end. That's a good idea.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. How many can they install? Are they pretty quick?

STU WILLIAMS: They are very efficient at their job. They're able to install 10 windows a day. Given the height and the location of these windows, that is miraculous.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Yeah, don't think I could do that.

STU WILLIAMS: Like I said, they are good. The nice feature with having the productivity rate and the quantity, ProEst does calculate for us the labor hours as well as days, so how long each item will take to complete, which is very beneficial when it comes to assigning our general requirements. So I will jump to that right now.

So here are my general requirements for this project. You can see that they, too, are assemblies. I've got per diem, as well as some temporary facilities for my laborers, my centaurs. So we can assign some time to this project. And assuming that the Wizarding World uses the Gregorian calendar, we're going to say that this project will take four weeks with five working days a week. And we will have three laborers on this project.

Now my temporary facilities, if my math works, four weeks equals one month. And just like that, because these are assemblies, the math is calculated using formulas and filters down to all of these items. So my estimate is ready. We are approaching bid day. So I will take a look at what we do for comparing our bids in Bid Leveling.

Bid Leveling is a useful tool. It allows you to compare subcontractor bids, apples to apples. But another nice feature is it allows you to compare subcontractor to the estimated value to what you performed yourself. So you can compare not only apples to apples but apples to oranges.

So Bid Leveling is based on the CSI division 50 format. So we received some bids for masonry. We'll jump over into the Masonry category. And I'm going to add some subcontractors.

So I received a bid from Fitchburg Wolf Lodges. And I received another bid from Surling Stone. So Fitchburg, they came in at $40,000. And Surling Stone came in at $36,000.

So I'm going to compare that to my estimated value. I see I have $37,355. Fitchburg is a little over, but Surling Stone came in under my estimated cost. So I will select Surling Stone. And in order to use it, I will go back into Bid Leveling and give a quick refresh.

And now you can see, in masonry, I have received two bids from two companies. Here is my estimated cost. Here is my awarded cost from our subcontractor, as well as the selected subcontractor. And now this toggle is highlighted. I can toggle it between sub and estimate.

And notice that the total here for the category, as well as the total estimate, changes in live time depending on how I award this category of work. So my estimate is finalized. Now I can move into my Summary tab.

So the Summary tab is where we will assign values for paying our taxes, which everyone loves. We can assign insurance as well as profit. So let's see. We've got our material tax, labor insurance as well, overhead profit. And we're going to assign a little bit of contingency for our centaur laborers. So let's say, centaur contingency.

And then we're going to make this just a lump sum figure. And we'll say, $10,000.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Yeah, it's our first time working with them. We want to make sure they're taken care of, right?

STU WILLIAMS: I honestly don't know if they eat like a horse or if they eat like a man.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: I think we'll be covered with 10 grand.

STU WILLIAMS: They have their own-- they have to power at least one horsepower. So they burn a lot of fuel.

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Right. They have cloven feet. I mean, they should be good at climbing the roofs.

STU WILLIAMS: And with our markups being complete, the estimate is done. And the last thing we need to do is now give this information in a presentable format to our client. And we can do so in the Report menu.

So the reports, if you haven't figured out, ProEst is very user friendly. We can customize reports to output a variety of information that either you want to present your client. If they want specific information, you can do so.

So you would come over to the menu of Reports and click on the report that you want generated. It will take a second to load. And here we go. Our report is done. It's ready for us to either print it out, we could export the report into Excel, or we could email the report as a PDF.

Now, I believe Autodesk is working on getting the owl delivery service for the good folks at Hogwarts. Is that right, Richard?

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Yeah, no promises on where that falls in the roadmap. But we're doing our best. We got to do some analog sometimes.

STU WILLIAMS: Well, we could use the centaurs for Pony Express if need be. Other than that, this report is done. And we can send it off to Professor McGonagall. So, Ariel, I will give you back the control.

ARIEL CASTILLO: Well, thank you, Stu, for that detailed demo. I hope you guys enjoyed it and that you also enjoyed the project that we selected to show you how you can use ProEst.

Now, of course, there's more to it. But we just wanted to keep it to an introduction. We'll give you a little bit of hint too, if you're interested in more, how you could do that.

Now let's talk a little bit about our experience. Just want to share that for us, this actually, like I said, it took some time. It was not a simple task. We underestimated in the beginning. But the reality is that it's bringing so much efficiency to our department that nobody's thinking about the past.

So this require us to get everybody to understand that ProEst was the way we wanted to-- it was the tool that was going to help us implement the changes that we wanted for our department. And right here, you can see a picture where we hosted one of the company-wide trainings, where we invited everybody in the company.

So we did the training with the estimators, obviously. But we also invited the project managers. Why? Because we wanted project managers to be exposed into what the estimators needed to do in order to get an estimate ready.

We also invited folks that are not related to operations. So we got our marketing team. We got our accounting team. And we got also superintendents involved as well.

We just wanted to get everybody in the company a feel of what ProEst could do for the company and how it could be used. It will also give them a different way of thinking about an estimator because they could see the amount of work that needed to be done. So that was very exciting. We hosted those as lunch and learns.

And we took probably about two hours where we also turn it into a competition just to see who could create the best bid. And it was a great, great experience. And the learning from all this is you need to get everybody involved. It's not only about your estimating team. It's not only about the preconstruction department.

This is a company decision. And we wanted to make sure that everybody knew about our endeavor and what we wanted to achieve as a company.

Now this leads to the next question. So, what's next? Yes, we got ProEst. We're able to implement it. But for us, there's multiple questions there.

So what's next for Miller-Davis? We want to integrate it with Build. A couple years ago, we made the decision to go with the Autodesk Construction Cloud. And Build is our project management solution.

So we know that we can leverage that integration. There's actually a really good integration between ProEst and Build that allows you to get the estimate into the cost module for Build. So that is something that we're looking into.

The next one will be integrating it with another department, which is accounting. There's ways to incorporate what we know as cost codes and the system knows them as accounting codes. We want to make sure that we integrate those all the way from each estimating item that can be associated with an accounting or cost code, depending on how you call them.

And then of course, more and more and more training. We want to get better at the tool. We want to make sure that we have a really good onboarding process and that everybody in the company understands how to use the tool. So we're working on developing standard operating procedures so it's simple for everybody to grab instructions and start working on an estimate.

Just like for Miller-Davis, we have the same question for ProEst. So what's next for ProEst, Richard?

RICHARD ANTCZAK: Sure. I'm going to start by letting you know that me and my team are right there when you need some more help with training. And we're looking forward to coming to Kalamazoo. I hope it's in the middle of the winter so I can see some snow.

From our side, we're obviously always working on the environment. ProEst, as a part of that constellation of products, we're always looking to get it more and more integrated into the other products that are there. Whereas, I'm no product manager in talking about the roadmap ahead, I know that that's obviously a priority for all of our customers and a priority for us to continue connecting more and more the tools that we offer.

So beyond that, just expanding the complexity and estimates of documents and the size of those projects that we could help you take on, that's obviously part of the trust that we're going to help build with our customers. And listening to our feedback from our customers. I've gotten plenty of feedback from Stu and Ariel and their team. All of our feature requests are always getting magnetized to the most commonly requested items are going to the top of the list for what gets put into the development pipeline next.

So from my side, I always love to see the new features that get released every few months. And I'll do my best to just learn how to use them, and how they can help you in ways that maybe you don't already realize. So that's definitely my goal. And I hope that we can continue to work together and figure that out.

I asked Ariel to put this slide in here because I think this image is a great example of something that I really enjoy about the work I get to do with companies like Miller-Davis. In this photo, you see a few things that are unique. You see the CEO of the company, Rex. He's there in the middle of the photo.

And you see a genuine look of enjoyment on the folks faces here. And that's not something that everybody posed for. You can see a sense of joy. And I know in a company like this, from what I've experienced, there's a sense of trust.

And as far as our beginning to implementation, Miller-Davis always made it clear that it was a priority to get the whole team on board with working toward a common victory. And that required folks to be on-board with taking time out of their day to implement something new. They had reasons to replace their old system. But they also had to keep using it until this new one was up and running.

And I think creating that feeling of safety for folks to say what they're concerned about and make a decision that's going to work for the team is something that's really important to bringing online these tools in a business like construction, where it's really-- I mean, everyone is short on time, 24 hours a day. Like Ariel said, some of these folks in this meeting are project managers. And some of the folks in their mid-day meetings are also project managers who are joining a different team that doesn't necessarily align with their email signature. And I think that's a really important thing for building collaboration.

And a tool-- that's its headline, right? That we're going to dissolve digital walls with ProEst. And we're going to get people in the same space so they can work together with greater transparency and break down those silos of data.

So to put an analogy on it, a company like Miller-Davis, they're bringing their traditions that they've built over 100 years into something that's brand new. And their executive team has to be open to bringing in new things that they might not completely understand.