Every week, we diligently update electrical material prices to reflect current changes. July was an exceptional month for electrical price changes. We worked overtime and logged over 500,000 electrical material prices changes in July 2007 alone. This means almost half of our comprehensive electrical material database was updated in one month. When was the last …
Read more »(The following interview appeared in Oser Communication Group’s “Electric Daily News” at the Electric West 2006 tradeshow in Las Vegas, NV on 3/1/06)
VISION INFOSOFT DEMOS SQL ESTIMATING SOFTWARE, FREE PRICING SERVICE TRIAL
Derrick Delliquadri, Marketing Director for Vision InfoSoft, explains why electrical contractors continue to seek out Vision InfoSoft for electrical software since 1993.
Electric Daily News (EDN):
What does Vision InfoSoft offer the electrical contractor industry?
Derrick Delliquadri (DD):
Vision InfoSoft’s primary focus is offering estimating, billing and pricing software for the electrical industry. Our EPIC™ pricing software allows electrical estimators to update their estimating software with local supplier, trade, and target pricing. We also offer a website design and management service for electrical contractors. We currently have over 10,000 contractor software customers and over 200 custom website customers.
EDN:
You recently released a new version of your estimating software. What sets Electrical Bid Manager SQL™ apart from other estimating software?
DD:
Well, Electrical Bid Manager SQL is our newest estimating software built on the Microsoft SQL database platform. We chose Microsoft’s SQL technology because it allowed us to build our estimating software system to handle an enormous amount of job data. This means handling thousands of jobs and multiple estimator support with no slow down whatsoever. In the past, our estimating software focused on single-user support. Our new Electrical Bid Manager SQL focuses on both single-user and multi-user network situations. We can confidently say that our estimating software is the most robust currently available.
EDN:
Wow, that sounds like quite an accomplishment. Are there any particular features in Electrical Bid Manager that you’d like to highlight?
DD:
Well yes, there are several. For one, it is tightly integrated with our EPIC pricing software and service. EPIC offers weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual pricing updates. EPIC can update almost all estimating software, but since EPIC is our product, we’ve spent extra time integrating it with Electrical Bid Manager.
Another feature of Electrical Bid Manager allows multiple estimators to be in the same job at the same time as well as providing expanded labor factoring; it has new timesaving takeoff modules, and thousands of timesaving material. It also comes preloaded with a huge database of material items, all with prices and labor units.
While the built-in database is loaded with all you’ll need for most jobs, you’ll always run into a job that requires specialty electrical materials. With EPIC software installed, you can click the EPIC toolbar button in Electrical Bid Manager and have quick access to item lookups. You can then import the item into Electrical Bid Manger for use in your estimate and future estimates. To my knowledge, no other estimating software offers this flexibility.
EDN:
You’ve mentioned your EPIC pricing software several times now. How does EPIC help keep pricing updated?
DD:
Electrical prices fluctuated a great deal in 2005 particularly because of the Hurricane Katrina, increasing oil prices and increases in foreign construction. Our EPIC pricing software subscription offers two things. One, as I mentioned before, you get pricing updates on a regular basis. Some contractors like updating their pricing once a week. Others would rather only get updates once or twice a month. Two, you get the EPIC pricing software tool that helps you integrate the new pricing into your estimating and billing software. It also allows you to quickly search through over 1.4 million items in the blink of an eye.
EDN:
In the blink of an eye?
DD:
That’s right! And to prove it, we are offering a free 90-day trial EPIC subscription to anyone that visits our booth 614 at the show. So, come on by!
EDN:
Do you have any new products on the horizon?
DD:
As a matter of fact, we just released a new residential estimating software program called Electrical Bid Manager Residential™. It can be used as a stand-alone or can be integrated into our Electrical Bid Manager Plus and Pro programs. It includes a unique “counting the holes” process that makes residential takeoffs incredibly quick.
We also just released a new wireless version of the PlanWheel™. The PlanWheel Wireless™ integrates with the latest versions of Electrical Bid Manager SQL Plus and Pro. The new PlanWheel Wireless is the only cordless plan measuring tool currently available. It allows you to measure plans from up to 25 feet away from your computer. The PlanWheel Wireless includes rechargeable batteries and USB charging cradle. Come by the booth to see it in action!
We make it a point to listen to our customers. Combining our customers’ ideas with our years of experience in the industry, we are constantly continuing to develop our Electrical Bid Manager family of software. Electrical Bid Manager looks to continue its strong pedigree of easy to use, yet powerful, estimating software.
EDN:
Vision InfoSoft is a successful software company. To what do you attribute your success?
DD:
Beyond some of the things I just mentioned, we also have an incredible team of employees that keep our customers happy with new software updates and unbeatable customer service and support. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our dedicated employees. However, our customers are the primary reason for our success. Frankly, if they didn’t buy our software, we wouldn’t be able to continue creating industry leading software, add-ons and improvements the way we do. I’d like to thank all our Vision InfoSoft customers for continuing to support us while we support them.
>> Click here to view the “Electric Daily News” issue in its entirety.
Read more »Prices are going up on thousands of electrical items due to the effects of the recent hurricanes and high oil prices. The items below are an example of just some of the items that have increased dramatically during September/October 2005.
What contractor has the rare luxury of time to manually update their bids every time electrical prices change? Never mind taking the time to stay on top of price changes. A contractor can save a lot of time by subscribing to an electrical price update service. Vision InfoSoft offers the EPIC Pricing System as a pricing solution for electrical contractors. EPIC allows you to automatically keep all your pricing updated. EPIC also allows you to pull in pricing from your local suppliers. Using your local supplier’s pricing is free with an EPIC subscription.
Recently, we got word from an EPIC customer regarding the effect the hurricane generated price changes had on his bid.
“Since building materials in general have become so volatile because of Katrina, increasing our EPIC Pricing subscription frequency from monthly to twice monthly made a lot of sense. We recently bid a job w/ EBM that had $7K worth of wire in it. From the time it took for the job to be awarded and the wire order to be placed with our supplier the price escalated to $12K +! EPIC has saved our profits on more than one occassion.” (EPIC Customer Testimonial)
Electrical contractors use EPIC to…
Click the link below to learn more about EPIC Pricing System:
http://www.visioninfosoft.com/products/electrical/epic/pricing/index.php
Generic / Commodity Materials
One of the peculiarities of the electrical and plumbing industries is the fact that a number of manufacturers provide nearly identical products. Many products in the industry are relatively generic. For example, over a dozen companies make conduit fittings for electrical and plumbing, at least a half dozen make electrical wiring devices, and several companies also make a number of the supports and other materials which are used in both industries. For the most part, contractors perceive the different brands as interchangeable and don’t usually specify the brand when ordering these materials.
Other products are virtually true commodities. Conduit (or Pipe) and Wire are rarely listed or specified by brand. The industry standards for these products are well established and it would be rare for a contractor to care of even be aware of the brand of pipe or wire they purchase.
Unique Materials
And then there are unique products that are essentially available from one manufacturer. Many fixtures for electrical and plumbing are relatively interchangeable, but for specific styles and features, there may be only one choice. And even when there is more than one choice for a component, the owner or engineer may specify a limited number or selections. In this case, the contractor will purchase a particular brand and catalog number.
Your Pricing Strategy
Specifying specific material brands usually complicates estimating and billing matters for the contractor, depending upon the approach. In all of the major estimating software and billing software programs for electrical and plumbing contractors, the vast majority of items are treated as generic or commodity types of items. This simplifies pricing for the supplier, contractor and end customer because there is no need to select the manufacturer or catalog number. For contractors and customers who want to select and price the brand of specific items, this makes matters more complicated. Most people try to avoid this level of detail because all parties involved: supplier, contractor and/or end user; may need to reference or provide this information in any pricing reports or quotations.
So the question is why do some contractors insist on using specific products rather than the generic ones and does this make sense from a business point of view? The desire to price specific rather than generic or commodity items seems to be driven by the need to have very accurate pricing.
Target Price
In all of the Vision programs for estimating, billing and pricing, the Target price generally provides enough cushion so that the contractor won’t under price any item, whether he uses a generic, commodity, or manufacturer/catalog number specific item. For bidding, the concern is that overpricing an item or items can result in a lost bid. For Time and Material work, the concern is that overpricing some items could result in a disgruntled customer. Occasionally, I run across contractors who are nearly obsessed with pricing from their true cost and are therefore forced into pricing specific items. This not only requires a tremendous amount of time to set up and maintain, but it seems to result in a much less profitable pricing strategy.
Meeting Customer Pricing Demands
Of course I cannot claim to understand a contractor’s knowledge of their type of market or its local demands. But I have trained literally thousands of contractors over the years and while the desire for super competitive pricing isn’t unusual, it certainly isn’t the norm to take it to the extreme of obtaining true cost on all items. My observation is also that the contractors who use the “generic” pricing and markup on the Trade price (or even use Retail) pricing are the ones who are the most successful and profitable at service work. Sometimes, contractors get so caught up in trying to provide accurate and fair pricing that they lose sight of the whole process. I know from personal experience and feedback from our customers I have trained, that most of their customers only inquire about the hourly rate when they need service; they rarely ask how the material is priced.
There certainly are end customers who are extremely price conscience. But normally, they are the minority and my suggestion would be to either give them a lower hourly rate, a lower markup on the highly visible items, or just don’t do business with them. But don’t spend endless hours trying to devise a pricing system that is totally fair to the highly cost sensitive customer, yet less profitable for the other more reasonable customers. The price sensitive customers won’t care what you charge anyway; it will always be too much.
To learn more about our Time & Material Billing Manager software, click here.
To learn more about our EPIC Pricing System software, click here.
written by Brian Hoffelder – Vision’s Software Training Professional
1-800-258-7752 x120
Conduit prices have fallen dramatically this month. This is just the opposite of what was happening a year ago.
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