Cost management Budget limitations

[Strider_H]

Currently there are uncountable limitations in the cost management module. If possible, I would like to break them down and hope from Autodesk Team to solve them as soon as possible as these are already hurting operations.

Budget: 

1- Budget limitation of 10,000 budgets per project. Most mega projects have at least 5000 Bill of quantities line items. Just imagine the number of budget line items associated to those. make the limit to be at least 50,000 budget line items.

2-Budget subitems. Currently budget sub items follow the hierarchy of the budget line item, what is need that the subitem to have fixed classification code as its main item, or to have at least the option to make it available from the account admin.

3- Mapping budget to BOQ line item in SOV of the main contract. What the system is missing is a better way to have a direct and easy comparisons between BOQ selling/ Budget / Cost. linking them (as sum(if)) in excel would make the software applicable to use.

4-Importing Custom Attributes. I don't know about this but having to use APS or manually entering Mutiple custom attributes for Mutiple budgets/contracts doesn't make the cost management module applicable to use, also having the ability to have calculations on numeric field in custom attributes is a must.

There are many needed customizations needed for the cost management module, but I think from my perspective that those are the most needed to be applied right now.

[michael_johnsonPAG9G]

I agree, there's definitely major limitations on budgets. We effectively have to manage forecasting and budgets outside of ACC and then bring the relevant information in. 

The way budgets work does not lend itself to Bills of Quantities or bills measured in accordance with standard methods of measurement such as New rules of measurement or ASMM. 

• No ability for headings 
• No ability for subheadings
• cannot have multiple items with the same code. 

Budget and Main Contract more often than not do not have back to back bills. Main contract cannot be used for budget as main contract is the "selling bill" 

We quite often have BoQ's over 10,000 lines (especially if each item is broken into labour/plant/material). So expanding the limit would work although due to the current architecture it doesn't work anyway. 

Item 3 above also has issues a main contract is limited to one budget line, there is no many to many items. 

Simplest example of how this doesn't work is:- 

The budget line items do not have indirects as these need to be tracked/forecast and costed differently. so they are managed below the line. The main contract has the indirects rolled up into the items which is common practice in ECI, D&C and C only contracts. there is no way to map or % allocate the indirects across multiple items. 

[ian_turner]

Entering a BOQ as the budget is not the expected use case for Cost Management.

It is the source, but BOQs are not a user friendly way of understanding how your budgets are holding up at a budget code/cost code level

The BOQ is what you estimate with resources and the budget is the summary of each of the resources

Eg I might have a whole BQ section for Concrete with 100s of line items, but to manage it i only want to see summarised Concrete labor, materials items, plant/equipment and or Subcontractors

Not a line item for every single instance.

So the resource data behind the BOQ is the input, and when you create Subcontracts is the format for the output

But to manage your costs and understand how you're performing against each budget code you have a summarised view.

If you can share your contact details we can get someone to assist you with it

[Strider_H]

Usually In Middle East and GCC, practice is to break every single BOQ line down into a full Cost-Breakdown Structure (CBS), so that labour, materials, plant and any indirects are each mapped back to the exact BOQ item. This lets us drive (profit <> budget <> cost) comparisons at the granular level of each BOQ line and its CBS components.

Because of that:

• A hard cap of 10,000 budget lines per project is essentially hard to implement on mega-scale jobs, we usually run 1000– 4000 BOQ lines, each split into multiple CBS entries.

• And relying on “sub-items” isn’t practical either, since the flexible coding scheme prevents reliable grouping or sorting for roll-ups and filters.

If there are any alternative approaches or workarounds you could recommend, I’d greatly appreciate your input.

Contact Email:  mohamed.abohussain@cwc.com.sa
@ian_turner