Resource List Creation and Organization

If we think back to the concept of a pricing library which was covered in the introduction, something to note is that a pricing library has three elements, each of which forms a level, namely:

Resources (Level 1)

Clusters (Level 2)

Worksheets (Level 3 - Bid Item/Line item level)

Resources are the fundamental elements that are needed to create a unit rate buildup. Think of them as the smallest building blocks needed to create a larger structure that will form the unit rate.

Resources are things that you are directly spending money on and which can always be acquired in discrete units, e.g a brick, a bag of cement, an hour of labor, a piece of equipment, or a meter of cable.

The price of a resource is known as its base allowable. This price can, however, be modified to apply things like exchange rates or loading factors to the resource (an example of a loading factor would be a 10% duty on an imported resource), which will then give you the modified effective allowable. The effective allowable should be the full actual price that you are paying for one unit of that resource.

So, your resource list is simply a list of all of the resources which you typically use on your projects, so typically all of your materials, labor, and equipment.

Now, before we go into how to create the resource list, something to bear in mind is that this list can become very large very quickly, so it is useful to have a way of organizing this list into groups (for example materials, labor, etc.) both to make specific resources easier to find as well as to enable you to run reports on the higher group level.

In order to handle this Trimble Quest has two ways of grouping resources together, resource attributes and tags. We will first discuss how to create both of these so that we will be able to organize our resource list from the start.