As a government contractor-pricing manager, you face the daily struggle of ensuring your estimates capture every cost element. The list of items is long and includes labor, materials, subcontractors, travel, engineering, manufacturing, supplies, and more. It’s even more difficult when you consider that costs change as projects evolve and time passes.
This post explores how companies capture and manage their bid-related costs to allow for accurate and consistent pricing that ensures higher win rates with U.S. Government agencies.
ProPricer Captures All Costs
If a project cost exists, ProPricer can capture it. That’s because the ProPricer tool captures every piece of information related to developing cost proposals, allowing you to manipulate the data to provide cost breakdowns and roll-ups any way you choose. For example, consider the following costs:
- Labor
- Material
- Subcontractors
- Travel
- Miscellaneous
- Inter-divisional costs
- Associated material costs
- Allocations
ProPricer allows you to input, review, and manipulate all of the above as a whole or break them down by WBS, CLIN, etc. The screenshot below shows how ProPricer captures the costs and provides them within a WBS.
To help your company management and government analysts understand the drivers behind each cost, ProPricer captures the elements that make up individual costs. Referring back to our cost list above, the following image displays cost elements for “travel” within a single project estimate (see image below).
ProPricer captures this level of detail for every cost you put into the system. The solution also prompts you to include cost details you may have overlooked; ‘hotel’ and ‘airfare’ are obvious costs to capture, but the estimator may have missed ‘mileage’ without ProPricer's proactive prompts.
ProPricer Helps You Understand How Raw Costs Impact Projects
When ProPricer captures an individual cost item (e.g., technician, engineer, etc.), the solution prompts you to input all elements associated with that cost. In the image below, you can see how you’ll erode profit margins and underbid for an engineer when all cost elements aren’t included.
In the same image, you can see that the cost elements of overhead, G&A, profit/fee, direct cost of money (COM), and G&A COM are added to the rate for an engineer (ENGR). The image also shows that ProPricer captures elements for non-labor items. In this case, you can see the cost elements related to material and manufacturing. (Note that these are “project” views and that complete cost breakdowns for manufacturing and materials appear in views specific to each of those costs, as you saw earlier in the travel cost breakdown.)
ProPricer Won't Let You Forget Your Costs
We all have those hectic days when things slip – we miss a comma or skip an entire cost element, for example. This virtually never happens with ProPricer; not only do the prompts remind you, the system also preserves detailed historic pricing data for reuse.
When all your costs are input, ProPricer applies the algorithms, formulas, and time-shifting calculations to them, including their summary views. This allows you to report overall project costs with ease, as in the image below.
Customers Choose ProPricer for Fast Cost Estimating
ProPricer has become the leading pricing solution for contractors because of their longstanding ability to capture and report all costs, develop and maintain any number of CERs, and report on them with ease.
Take shipbuilder FMM, for example. The U.S. Navy contractor develops pricing for projects under extreme time and cost pressures. They use ProPricer to deliver timely and accurate bids, respond quickly to change orders, and present reporting sufficient for strict compliance measures.
Or consider the aerospace supplier that maintains all their data in ProPricer. Their estimating team streamlines proposal development by reusing their library of cost data from one proposal – or even one scenario – to the next.
Conclusion
Customers choose ProPricer because today’s government contractors must capture and report every possible cost and justify them with detailed cost breakdowns and roll-up cost summaries. Sound difficult? It used to be – before ProPricer. Today, ProPricer customers achieve all that through easy-to-use, intuitive dashboards that capture every cost element and associate them in virtually any manner. Contact us for more information.
