Recent Development Highlights

As always at simPRO we are improving the system to make it easier to use for our customers and able to deliver better results.

Here is a look at a few of our more recent developments.

Labour Type Multiplier / Fit times

So you have a prebuild library of all the different work you do, but you find that when you use a prebuild on an estimate you’re not entirely confident that you have allowed the correct amount of labour because the scenario for this job is slightly different to what was in mind when the prebuild was created.

Or perhaps you may want to know, based on the labour demographics that you’re using, how much time should be allowed on the job taking into account the skill levels and productivity of apprentices vs. fully qualified engineers?

Hmmm… what to do?

Enter, labour type multipliers and fit times. First I’ll go through them separately, though if you pair these two up, you end up with some very powerful functionality giving you great flexibility in your estimating.

Labour Type Multipliers

Go to Admin → Setup → Labour → Rates. In here you can specify as many different labour rates as you like. Typically these will be configured for the different charge out rates you have and often this will also mean different rates for tradesman vs apprentices etc. There is now an additional column called Multiplier.

Here is how it works: lets say to do a particular job, a tradesman will take 1hr, where an apprentice will take 1.5hrs. Here, because we are basing our rates on what the tradesman can do we will leave that labour type at a multiplier of 1 and put the apprentice labour type with a multiplier of 1.5. This is indicating that a second year apprentice will take 50% longer to complete the work than a fully qualified engineer, so the 1.5 hours listed instead of 1 hour indicates that it will take 50% longer for that labour type to do the work, (if a multiplier of 2 was used, that would indicate that this labour type would take 100% longer to do the work, or 2 hours instead 1).

Now lets jump to a job (add/edit items). With this configuration if I put my engineer’s labour on the job it will say I need 60 mins. If I change that labour type to apprentice then it tell me that I will need 90 mins on the job. However, if I put a tradesman and an apprentice on the job I will now need 75 minutes on the job as it averages across the 2.

Fit times

Ok, in this instance I may base (for example) all my prebuilds time on the basis of installing to plasterboard. But what happens when I need to fix to concrete, hard wood, brick etc? Now simPRO has the option of applying different fit times for different scenarios that you can apply to the same prebuild which will increase the estimated time required to complete the job.

To configure the fit times head over to Admin → Setup → Labour → Fit Times.

Create as many as you want. Think of these perhaps as degree’s of difficulty. You can put in your fit time name (eg. Concrete, Normal, Hard Wood, Poor Access etc) then apply the appropriate multiplier. As with the labour multiplier, you use 1.1 to increase the time by 10%, 1.5 for a 50% increase in time etc.

Back in our job now (add/edit items), next to all the items on the job you can set in the time column what the fit time should be. So if I have my original prebuild at 60 minutes, and apply a fit time of say concrete which has a 2x multiplier on it, the prebuild will now need 120 minutes to install.

Pretty cool huh.

Now let’s get tricky with it. Let’s say we have a prebuild with 60 minutes required on it. I apply the concrete fit time, which now says I need 120 minutes, however I am going to use an apprentice and a tradesman to do it for me. Now I am actually going to need 2.5 hours to do it all up.

Well, that should take out a whole lot of the guess work for you and allow you get much more accuracy in your estimates and your labour allowances for different installs.

I encourage you guys to go into the system and have a play with the different scenario’s and how they effect the billable time on the jobs. If you need any more help, please feel free to head over to our online help.