Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
(OP)
I am a civil engineer taking on more of an estimating role for a heavy construction general engineering contractor. I, like most young engineers, lack the true field time to obtain solid productivity rates and estimating methodologies. Can someone please recommend some great study material. After searching on google I determined many manuals are outdated and provide lots of different personal opinions which can be hard for a young engineer to gauge.





RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Hopefully you can find a mentor in the company. Otherwise you can look at older costs proposals your company has put together and start to break-down each line item unit cost to get a general baseline and then determine how/why they vary from project to project.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Since you are short on field experience and working for a heavy construction and engineering contractor, you should be able to find a way to relate to the field by working with or talking to the field personnel to get their personnel and finding out what their problems are relating to real construction situations on different type of climates, construction and materials.
While in engineering school (thankfully a 5 year curriculum)and working summers on highway and bridge construction. The best experience was working as field liaison engineer on a huge iron ore processing facility (2500 employees daily for several years). This ranging from railroad sub grades, bridges and manufacturing/processing buildings. Dirt jobs were up to 2,700,000 yards plus another 500,000 yard of rock excavation with soils ranging from muskeg to silty sand and ideal base materials.
I learned more from being in/relating to the field there after a good, solid engineering education and a couple of years of being facilities engineering in the aerospace industry where the "cowboys" ruled the roost to make engines and test them in real life, than I ever got from a prescriptive "manual".
Being with a large firm will give you the opportunity to learn the other practical side and still interact with the estimators that created to construction projects for the firm and what irregularities and problems are.
Just keep your eyes and ears open and absorb and understand since your firm must build and perform according to specifications (the manual) and understand what the real world is.
Dick
Engineer and international traveler interested in construction techniques, problems and proper design.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Ask the superintendents for their opinion; they're probably the best resource.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
To the others- I understand spending time in the field is the best form of ed-you-me-cation but there has to be a manual or reference you constantly turn to, or one that help you when you were starting off. Any suggestions? thanks for your input so far.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Compare the values from the Heavy Construction volume to those of your company. This will provide you some perspective when talking to more senior estimators. Also put some thought into the task, how would you do it or set it up? Consider people, equipment, budgets available to you as a company. Again this will provide perspective and get you to think about the effort involved instead of just taking values from a book.
Lastly there are some texts out there on the topic of Construction Methods as well as Construction Estimating.
Good luck.
Regards,

Qshake
Eng-Tips Forums:Real Solutions for Real Problems Really Quick.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
The estimating I do now is from the other side of the on the other side of the fence (this is a case where you don't want to be the low bidder; coming in 2nd or 3rd is ideal) As Qshake stated, Means is a good source of information. I use it for some things; painting, excavating, etc; things are fairly straight up. On a bridge rehab job, where there are steel repairs, bearing replacements, bridge jacking Means isn't geared toward that type of work.
You didn't mention what type of heavy/civil construction. People have didn't interpretation of heavy construction.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating
Factors are a subjective thing. It's hard to say where to add them. One thing to keep in mind, estimators need to work with schedulers. Too often that becomes a disconnect in the process and these two items have to go hand in hand.
Also NJDOT has a scheduling manual that you might find helpful.
RE: Heavy Civil Construction Estimating