Unit 6 - Proposal Items
In Unit 6, we will focus on some areas that you may find confusing. We will do our best here to make things as clear as possible and keep you on track with your implementation.
In this unit, we will take a close look at ways you can price your projects. We have three items to check in this Unit: Groups, Options, and Categories. You can add groups and options to the provided spreadsheet "Kompass_Configuration and Business Processes.xlsx". Categories cannot be edited.
Before proceeding, let us examine all three concepts together. The main purpose of these items is to allow you to predefine your costs. These could be costs for employees based on their role, equipment, subcontractors, and more. We have customers who have dozens of such costs, occasionally divided by job role, timing of shifts, departments, etc. We’ll take a closer look at these items below and demonstrate how you can gather similar costs into groups.
Options are where the costs are stored, and they are the items at the bottom of the chain. Groups are used to gather similar options. As can be seen for the day and night shifts, senior and junior engineers are duplicate items purely because their day shift costs can differ from the night shift costs. Categories are located at the top of the chain and are used to gather similar groups.
Categories
These categories are currently static and cannot change. However, we have included them here to offer a better understanding of how proposal items are grouped. There are three categories as seen above, Resources (occasionally called "Staff"), Equipment, and Other (which can include any type of costs).
Groups
Defining groups can be a daunting task, especially for organizations who have never considered grouping their costs. From experience, this is an area where many customers struggle. The main challenge is the Resources category. Some of our customers define their groups by shift (day/ night), some by department (survey engineers/ scanning engineers), others will aim for field/ office employees, while some might even skip the group altogether and include all options under one large group. We believe the best approach is to reflect on how you currently price your projects and conduct costing. Additionally, a meeting with our team may help provide some additional guidance. All groups should be listed in the provided spreadsheet.
Options
As we have seen above, costs are stored in options, not in groups or categories. Options tend to have the longest list of entries. There can be duplicate options (as seen above), but only as long as they belong in a different group. You have the option to define different costs per day/hour and different cost for field/office work as well.
Next, we’ll move on to a shorter unit