As far as a single project is concerned, the workflow of cost personnel can be divided into three stages: reading drawings, calculating quantity and pricing, and the main workload of completing the cost of a single project is in the stage of calculating quantity and pricing. At present, the pricing software has been fully popularized, which greatly improves the work efficiency and quality of cost professionals and reduces their work intensity. With the appearance of pricing software, cost personnel can shorten the pricing work from 10 to 1-2 days. At present, the work of "engineering quantity calculation" has become a bottleneck for cost personnel to further improve their work efficiency.
Since the early 1990s, some pricing software companies have introduced engineering quantity calculation software, and after the promotion of 10 for many years, hundreds of engineering quantity calculation software have appeared in the market. However, today, most cost personnel still use the manual method of "drawing+pencil+calculator". Why?
Through the author's investigation, it is found that the engineering quantity calculation software on the market at present can be roughly divided into several types:
1, an auxiliary computing tool based on simple tables. This kind of software is often a gadget attached to pricing software, or a personal development work of cost personnel. Its function is often too simple, which can only meet some specific applications and has no universal use value.
2. A computing tool based on the secondary development of Ms Excel. Microsoft excel spreadsheet software has been widely used in China. Using VBA tools built in excel for secondary development, a powerful and elegant calculation formula of engineering quantity can be made, which has certain application value. However, VBA's secondary development of excel is not a source code level development work. In a fixed software system framework and interface, it is often impossible to realize the functions that the software wants to achieve at will. For example, the table interface of excel is a single-level table, so it is impossible to realize nested tables or multi-level tables, and it is impossible to directly express the hierarchical relationship between calculation subheadings and detailed calculation formulas. In addition, it is difficult to link component library and quota library in excel.
3, graphic engineering quantity calculation software. At present, there are many such softwares in the market, which mainly express the engineering structure through graphic reconstruction and extract the engineering quantity of the whole project with attribute definition. As far as its graphics platform is concerned, it can be divided into autonomous graphics platform and Autocad platform, in which the drawing function of autonomous graphics platform is not perfect, and the basic links of drawing often cannot meet the requirements of use, while the calculation software based on Autocad draws on the drawing function of Autocad. However, in practical application, there are several essential problems in the three-dimensional graphic engineering quantity calculation software:
(1)Autocad platform is expensive, and its drawing function is complex, which requires considerable extra workload to master, which is equivalent to transferring the designer's drawing work to the staff who were only responsible for the cost.
(2) Compared with manual calculation, graphic calculation needs two processes: reconstructing graphics and redefining data. These two processes not only need extra time and energy, but also have a great influence on the accuracy of the calculation results.
(3) Components with special shapes cannot be drawn and calculated. In this case, it is often necessary to borrow other software tools for calculation, resulting in inconsistent report data.
(4) The report data of graphic calculation is huge, and it is difficult to check the report automatically generated by the program and the report manually calculated by the program.
It can be seen that there are still many problems in the existing computing software. The great leap forward development concept in computing development has led to two extremes. One extreme is the blind pursuit of developing so-called "three-dimensional" or even "four-dimensional" graphic computing, which leads to the software being divorced from the actual use needs of users and unable to really spread to front-line users; At the other extreme, while competing to develop complex and huge software, the basic requirements of engineering quantity calculation are ignored, which leads to the inability to realize the most basic functions of table editing and calculation, which makes the important stage of table format calculation not fully developed. Users have not formed the basic habit of calculating engineering quantities with computers, and they have begun to engage in complex graphic processing, which is really suspected of "adding fuel to the fire". This has caused a strange situation in the market: on the one hand, there are many kinds of graphic calculation software on the market, on the other hand, most users are still using manual calculation.
Therefore, the suppliers of software in the construction industry should reflect: What kind of computing software do cost personnel need? The author believes that a set of computing software that can be accepted and popularized by the majority of cost personnel should at least have the following two elements:
1, simple and practical. Cost personnel are generally busy and can simply operate computers such as Internet access, word processing, spreadsheet processing and budget software. Therefore, the software should be easy to use and immediately applied to engineering practice, and then let users gradually improve their skills in using the software in practice.
2. Easy to reconcile. Nowadays, owners pay more and more attention to the process control of cost and the quality control of bid evaluation. An important document of process control is the bill of quantities. A clear and complete bill of quantities consistent with manual calculation can not only greatly shorten the process of auditing and reconciliation, but also effectively improve the quality of auditing and reconciliation, thus winning the trust of the owners.
These two points are also the fatal weakness of most computing software at present. Recently, the "table calculation software" represented by Shanghai Haitian Ren Technology Information Consulting Co., Ltd. began to appear in the market. At first glance, the interface and operation of the software are similar to excel, but after actual use, especially the large number of component libraries, variable tables and quota libraries built into the software, the efficiency of calculation engineering has been greatly improved. In my opinion, at this stage, such calculation software is a successful path for the transformation of engineering quantity calculation from manual to electronic.
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