A printing company was in need of an estimating tool to replace their existing costing sheet done through Excel. While they were quick at using Excel, they often made mistakes by not remembering dependencies required of different line items added to the costing sheet. In addition, each Excel file was saved to a massive file system that was not easy to use and would take a long time for the team to search for projects to work on.
The team requested that the estimating tool created needed to be as quick to use as their existing Excel solution, or quicker. The time to find files needed to be reduced in half compared to searching through a massive folder system.
A custom FileMaker database was designed to easily search for customers, projects, and estimates. The estimate costing sheet was designed to allow for previous estimates to be used as a baseline to duplicate, or a new estimate to be created.
If a new estimate was being created, then the user would move through a wizard of a few questions that would automatically build the costing sheet including all dependencies required within the line items.
Through implementation, the team saw a 50% savings in time spent searching for and creating estimates. Mistakes were greatly reduced, leading to more accurate costing sheets returning more revenue.
