Generate a Timeline with Pre-Populated Measurement Values

As we saw in the above sections Trimble Quest gives you the ability to manually create custom measurements, group them together in a timeline and define their values.

Trimble Quest also gives you the ability to generate a timeline where you can automatically create measurements as well as automatically populate/define their values based on certain criteria. This is typically used to generate forecasts mathematically for your project.

To generate a timeline, click on the Timeline button at the bottom of the measurements tab and then click on the +Generate button:

This will bring up the Generate Timeline box:

Here you can specify the relevant details like the timeline code, name, start date, end date and measurement frequency (monthly or weekly). So, for example if you have a six month contract duration and you select monthly measurement frequency a timeline containing six measurement quantities (one for each month) will be generated.

You can also select whether you want to automatically generate reports in all scenes based on the generated timeline and whether you want to pre-populate the values of the measurement quantities based on selected criteria.

If you choose to populate the measurement values by switching on the Populate Measurement Values button, the Generate Timeline Box will expand to give you the following options:

Here your first step is to decide if you want to further break down your timeline by selecting the start and end dates of a specific bill attribute grouping. For more detail on bill attributes see Bill Attributes, but essentially this allows you to create a rough time sequence for your project by selecting which groups of line items will start and end at which points of the timeline duration. Switch this option on using the radio button for Break Down by Bill Attribute.

You will then select which bill attribute you want to use as well as the appropriate start and end dates in the next step (after selecting all of the relevant criteria in this one).

Next, you will select which measurement quantity you want to spread across the measurement quantities you will be generating. By default, the total Bill Quantity will be selected, but you could choose a different measurement, e.g. if you have a different final estimated or re-measured quantity that you want to use to generate a forecast.

Next, you will select the Forecast Type, i.e. you will select the mathematical formula that you want to use to calculate the values to populate the generated measurement quantities in your timeline. There are a number of different options available, but the one used most often is the default option of an S-Curve. Lastly, you then have the option of selecting whether or not you want your forecast to be incremental.

Once you have made all your selections, click on Done in the bottom right corner. This will then either generate your timeline or if you had selected Break Down by Bill Attribute it will take you to the following two next steps:

Here you can select the bill attribute class by which you want to break your timeline down. Please note that the bill attribute classes available to you will be the ones that you had defined, so these are simply examples. For this example I selected to break down my timeline by trades, which brought me to the following step.

As you can see, here I can select the start and end dates for each of the bill attributes available in the specific bill attribute class. This allows for a more accurate forecast, based on the more granular breakdown of when which parts of the project will be starting and ending.

Once you have completed this last step, simply click on Done and your timeline will be generated. If you had selected the Generate Reports option default reports will have been saved for the generated timeline in each scene which can be accessed via the Reports tab in the right hand side Action tab in any scene in Trimble Quest.

So, for example, a generated timeline with a duration of six months where we pre-populated the measurement values based on an S-Curve will have had the following BOQ reports automatically generated:

And if we wanted to see those measurement quantities for we can simply select the Example Forecast Qty report, which will show us the following table where we can see how the total bill quantity has been spread across the six forecasted quantities:

The same reports will have been generated in each scene of Trimble Quest, so they can be viewed on for example the resource or attribute level as well.