Good tools for project proposal effort?
August 31, 2011 12:33 PM Subscribe
Are there good third-party software packages or tools that can be used to manage labor and material estimates during a project proposal process? It's a little bit of project management and a little bit of sales. Specific needs include...
(Rough) Inputs:
-- Labor rates by year by type of employee
-- Estimated labor hours by type of employee or by department
-- Labor hours spread by month
-- Tasks
-- Material costs
-- Other costs (travel, subcontractors, etc)
(Rough) Outputs:
-- Total cost
-- Price (based on a specified markup)
-- Staffing model by month
-- Spending model by month
-- Work breakdown structure
The strictest use case is a defense project that has specified a WBS with 150 tasks and needs BOEs and lots of other backup. The simplest use case is a project with 2-3 tasks involving maybe five people.
We currently have a beastly Excel spreadsheet that has no flexibility and can't quite do all of the above very well. If there's something a bit fancier that'll do the job I'd love to hear about it.
Please note that this is a hardware system so actual consideration for materials, manufacturing labor, etc is pretty important -- basically, anything that is software-project-centric probably won't help.
(Rough) Inputs:
-- Labor rates by year by type of employee
-- Estimated labor hours by type of employee or by department
-- Labor hours spread by month
-- Tasks
-- Material costs
-- Other costs (travel, subcontractors, etc)
(Rough) Outputs:
-- Total cost
-- Price (based on a specified markup)
-- Staffing model by month
-- Spending model by month
-- Work breakdown structure
The strictest use case is a defense project that has specified a WBS with 150 tasks and needs BOEs and lots of other backup. The simplest use case is a project with 2-3 tasks involving maybe five people.
We currently have a beastly Excel spreadsheet that has no flexibility and can't quite do all of the above very well. If there's something a bit fancier that'll do the job I'd love to hear about it.
Please note that this is a hardware system so actual consideration for materials, manufacturing labor, etc is pretty important -- basically, anything that is software-project-centric probably won't help.
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Quonab at 3:24 PM on August 31, 2011