Many contractors create reports for labor and/or material using the "EST functions" of the fabrication suite. Many contrators also have estimating and/or job cost accounting software that organizes cost by area, whether that is a drawing number or a geographical location in a buidling defined (usually) by the architect's key plan (ex: Level 4, Area A). Currently, however, you have to "individually choose" the boundaries you wish prior to running a report out of EST. This costs labor if your customer wants a breakdown of data in small areas... especially if changes occur and require reports to be re-run.
What if you could create "report boundaries" that would stay fixed once they were set (you could change them later) so every time you ran reports in an area, data for items inside those boundaires would be grouped together and reported together? Thus, you could set up your boundaries one time (just like you set up sheet files one time) and then just run reports. By default, any items not inside a report boundary could go in a group named "no boundaries" or something like that.
Most estimating software include this functionality... their default setting is to setup one section by one drawing number, but if you need to make "breakout areas" inside a drawing, you can define the breakout area (some will only let you do a quadrilateral, others will let you pick points so the area is any shape). By having a simliar function in EST, you make it easy to compare to estimate data someone may have from anotehr software, and you make it much similar to estimating software today if people are using EST to create bid estimates.
