Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with
Autodesk© Constructware©
Jeff Marsh – Autodesk, Inc.
CR4948 - Autodesk Constructware is a configurable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) construction
project management solution that helps deliver projects efficiently with near-time visibility into
job costs. So, how do you achieve this "near-time visibility"? It is all about the setup behind the
scenes: the configuration that is invisible to the end-users yet fundamental to making the system
mold itself to your business practices, terminology, and principles. Learn from the product
manager how to set up your system to minimize duplicate entry and ensure that users' activities
in workflows keep your costs visible, accurate, and up-to-date.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, you will be able to:

Understand Cost Management Anatomy in Constructware

Learn the 7 best practices for real-time cost control in Constructware
About the Speaker
Jeff currently is a Technical Product Manager for Autodesk® Constructware. Prior to this role at
Autodesk, Jeff was a technical consultant where he implemented and trained over 80
Constructware customers, large and small, in best practices for using project management
systems on their projects. Prior to joining Autodesk in 2006, Jeff served the AEC industry
selling construction project and building product data, and as a project manager with a regional
contractor in the Atlanta area. Jeff enjoys spending time with his three children, working on
construction projects around the home, and riding-racing anything that has two wheels.
Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Introduction
Autodesk Constructware® is the easily configured Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) construction
project management solution that helps construction projects run more smoothly and be
delivered more predictably and on-budget. To get your project delivered on-budget predictably,
you need a system that gives you real-time cost data, including projected final costs. To achieve
this, you have to make it easy for the end user – and this means doing some effective setup
behind the scenes.
Templates
Auto
Reports
Advanced
Macros
Real-Time
Cost
Management
ERP
Integration
Project
Copy
Workflow
/ Routing
Masking
&
Labeling
By doing this, you will make managing costs an extension of your users‟ documentation and
communication – not a separate task that must be kept up with. End users like that – they don‟t
want to be bothered with why it works, or how the cost gets updated: they just want it to work!
To be able to talk about the behind the scenes setup, you need to understand how
Constructware‟s Cost Management works. If you want to know more about Constructware
overall, you may want to check out this short YouTube video, because the class does not take
the time to go into an overall Constructware demo.
http://tinyurl.com/8min-cw-demo
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Introduction Understanding Cost Management
Cost Management in Constructware consists of 4 main areas:
 Budgeting
 Procurement (Contracts and POs)
 Change Management (Cost Events, RCOs, OCOs, CCOs,
 POCOs)
 Billing (Invoices and Payment Applications)
For the purposes of this presentation, we‟re
really discussing the items under
Procurement and Change Management,
and how they relate to the budget.
It‟s pretty simple. The header documents
like Cost Events and Contracts, contain
child “Cost Items” that tie together a vendor
(or your own firm), a scope or description,
and the amounts to hit a cost code in the
budget. One Cost Item can be on multiple
header documents (an OCO (Owner
Change Order) and on a CCO (Contract
Change Order), for example). The status of
the header document updates the Cost
Item, and there‟s a separate “Budget
Status” and “Cost Status” to impact the two
sides of the ledger (Budget and Cost). All of
this is very flexible and able to work your way – but
you do need to do the setup.
The purpose of this class is to tell you how to do it.
Figure 1
Cost to Complete Report
The Cost to Complete Report (Figure 2) is at the heart of the Cost Management process in
Constructware. The report is where real-time Cost Management gets reported. The Cost to
Complete Report allows the project team to anticipate and track projected cost. It is “real-time”
because the updates come from the real-time documents that are created in Constructware.
The movement of dollars on the Cost to Complete Report depends on the status of the
document’s Cost Items.
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Figure 2
The columns on the left side are budget columns, and the columns in the middle are cost
columns, and the right columns are the actual dollars paid out on the job. It‟s flexible, and you
don‟t have to use all of these columns, but this is the basic concept. Certain documents will only
affect thebudget side of the Cost to Complete Report (Budget Adjustments), and others will only
affect the cost of the Cost to Complete Report (Contracts, Purchase Orders, Contract Change
Orders (CCOs).
Cost and Actual documents will have a cost
status. Again the status of the document’s
Cost Items will dictate where the dollars will
appear on the Cost to Complete Report.
For example, a Contract Change Order (CCO),
which affects the cost, has a „Pending Change‟
cost status. The CCO dollars will appear in the
“Pend. Rev.” column of the Cost to Complete
Report (Figure 3), because of a setting you
have made in a template (see Best Practice #1
below).
When the CCO has its cost status changed to
an “Approved Change”, the CCO will move
from the “Pend. Rev.” to the “App. Rev.”
column of the Cost to Complete Report.
Figure 3
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
The dollars associated with these documents affect the Cost to Complete Report based on a
Cost „Status‟ and a „Dollar‟ field (Figure 4). The available statuses and dollar fields are shown
below.
Notice that the „Estimated’, ‘Proposed’ and ‘Committed’ dollar fields correspond to the
Cost documents, and the ‘Submitted’ and ‘Approved’ dollar fields correspond to the
Budget documents. Cost Management documents with a dollar amount in a dollar field and a
Budget or Cost status will appear in the Cost to Complete Report based on the assigned rules
and formulas.
Figure 4
Again, this is all very flexible and based on how you set up your site – which we will discuss in
these best practices below.
Best Practice #1 – Use Templates
In the Cost Management introduction, you heard about how header documents interact with the
cost codes in the budget to drive the real-time reporting in the Cost to Complete report. To make
the budget coding system work your way – and be compatible with your accounting system
(Best Practice #5), you‟ll need to get your Cost Code Template set up. The Cost Code Template
drives the budget code structure. To get the cost to hit the right column in your ledger – you‟ll
first need to actually have a ledger to hit. You create this with a Ledger Template. Your site can
have as many Cost Code Templates and Ledger Templates as you want, but each project gets
one of each to make a budget.
Figure 5
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Cost Code Templates
Set up your Cost Code Templates in Maintenance > Data Maintenance > Cost Code Templates.
The help system has exact steps, so here we‟ll just explain the concept. You can have up to 15
segments of up to 9 characters each. I‟m not smart enough to have a 15-segment cost code, so
I just have four in this example. But I‟ve seen smart people have 10 to 15 segments before. A
few key points to make here:
 The Name will show up on
your budget reports, so be
sure to use something short
but meaningful.
 The width will be enforced,
and should match up to your
accounting system.
 The Separator is not part of
the code, but shows up to
make the code more readable.
Figure 6
Ledger Templates
The Ledger Template is what creates all the columns like “Original Budget,” “Pending Change
Orders”, “Projected Bomb Crater” and things like that. Seriously, whatever you use in your
business to track the status of money – as committed, spent, or whatever – you should set that
up using the Ledger Template. Again, the online help gives you the step by step, but this is a
really important thing to get the way you want it before you start tracking costs, because
changing after the fact on an ongoing project isn‟t that much fun.
You can make as many columns as you want to in your Ledger Template, but there are only so
many Budget Statuses and Cost Statuses to go around. That‟s typically not an issue, because
most people tend to not want an infinite number of “buckets”, but tend to have more calculated
columns off of those buckets, and you can have as many calculated columns as you want to.
My example has a whole bunch of columns in it (evidently I‟ve decided I‟m smarter on Ledgers
than on Cost Codes), but you don‟t have to. I have seen really nice Ledger Templates with
only 5-6 columns in them, and I‟ve seen some with over 20. It‟s up to you and how you track
and project costs.
A few key points to make about Ledger Templates:
 Columns can either be “Data” or “Calculated”.
 Data columns are like “buckets” that documents dump money into or withdraw it from
based on their status.
 Calculated columns are formula driven, and can include other data or calculated
columns, or some “macros” for stuff like the Original Budget value from a Budget Code.
 Some of the formulas are very simple, as in “This column plus that column”. Some of
them are more complex, and involve nested formulas. You can get really fancy with Best
Practice #2 - Advanced Macros by inserting SQL statements into the formulas.
Budget Templates
A Budget Template lets you have a pretty much canned budget for your project. You can
include costs in there (which is sort of weird except for prototypical projects), or not. But you can
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
save yourself a lot of time by creating templates that include all the codes you want to have in
your project, complete with the appropriate Cost Code Template and Ledger Template. Then
when you create a new budget, just pick the right template and go. You don’t want to let the
project get started and have to catch up with the budget later.
Best Practice #2 – Use Advanced Macros
Ok, for this one we‟re going to re-visit the Ledger Templates subject. So far, all of the formulas I
have shown you include pretty simple equations, like “A + B”, or even tough ones like “(A +
B)/A.” However, if you want to have some conditional formulas in there, to execute logic like, “If
I haven‟t written a commitment, just assume that the final cost is equal to the budget,” you‟ll
need to write some SQL.
You can use the following SQL commands in a formula:














=
!=
<
>
CASE
WHEN
ELSE






END
AND
OR
NOT
NULL
THEN
(
)
+
*
/
^
Additionally, Constructware has the following built-in short-cuts to values or calculations, that
can be included in formulas just like another column. These are listed below.
 [BudgetCodeBudget] Budget code budget amount.
 [BudgetCodeEstimate] Budget code estimate amount.
 [BudgetCodeForecast] Budget code forecast amount.
 [BudgetCodeWorkComplete] Budget code percent work complete.
 [BudgetCodeBilled] Budget code billed amount.
 [BudgetCodeActual] Budget code actual amount.
 [CommittedExists] Committed amount exists (0=False,1=True).
So, let‟s talk about some examples you could create in your projects, shown below:
Example
Description
Sample SQL
Check for #Div/0
Error
I want to know the Change
Orders as a % of Budget
CASE WHEN [Org Bgt] = 0 THEN 0 ELSE
[APPROVED COs]/[Org Bgt] END
Expected Final
Cost
If there are commitments,
tally the expected final cost.
If not, just show the updated
budget.
CASE WHEN [CommittedExists] = 0
THEN [Pend. Rev. Bud.] ELSE [Orig.
Comm. Cost]+[App. Cost Chg.]+[Pend.
Cost Chg.]+[Proj. Cost Chg.] END
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Buyout
If there are commitments,
calculate the original budget
buyout. If not, show 0
because there‟s no contract
yet.
Case WHEN [CommittedExists] = 1 THEN
[ADJUSTED BUDGET]-[ORIGINAL
COMMITS] ELSE 0 END
Hyper-Conservative
Estimate at
Complete
If the Total Appropriations is
greater than the Total
Projected costs, then
project the Total
Appropriations as Estimate
at Completion.
CASE WHEN [TOTAL APP]>[TOT PROJ]
THEN [TOTAL APP] WHEN [TOTAL
APP]<[TOTAL PROJ] THEN [TOTAL
PROJ] WHEN [TOTAL APP]=[TOTAL
PROJ] THEN [TOTAL PROJ] END
Best Practice #3 – Copy Projects
Even better than copying a budget template is copying a project and its budget when you have
a prototypical project. I typically refer to this as a “template project” (Figure 7). This is better
because if your Ledger Template depends on the Forecasts in the Budget, you can include
those to have a balanced budget (no over and under) from day one.
Figure 7
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Figure 8
Note that not only can I copy my Budget and Cost Codes, I can also copy my ERP Integration
(“Data Exchange Setup”) – to be discussed with Best Practice #6 below. By copying this
information from project to project, and not setting it up manually – you can greatly increase
your chances of achieving “real time” Cost Management.
Best Practice #4 – Masking & Labeling
Constructware Cost Management modules have a lot of fields available in them, and they use
some pretty generic terminology that is intended to apply to many companies large and small,
owners and contractors alike. But, if you want your users to really understand intuitively how to
use the forms – and to actually fill them out in real time - you should consider simplifying and
“translating” them for the users.
You do this with Masking & Labeling, an option you can find in Maintenance > Data
Maintenance > Module Customization.
Figure 9
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Masking
Masking is simply taking the fields in a form, and making them read-only or hidden. If you aren‟t
going to be using a field – HIDE IT!
Users always feel compelled to fill in fields that you present to them, so don‟t make their busy
lives any harder than necessary by leaving fields in there when you‟re not using them. You do
this by creating a new
“Masking” template,
changing the settings of
each field, and saving it.
Oh, and whichever
template is marked “In Use”
is the one that‟s being used
in the site.
Figure 10
Figure 11
Labeling
Labeling is your opportunity
to use your own business
terminology in
Constructware. This makes
it a lot easier for your users
to use – of course –
because the module names
and field names mean the
same thing to them in
Constructware that those
words mean elsewhere.
Again, like Masking, this is
super-easy to set up. All you
do is create a new Labels
template, decide which
Figure 12
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
fields you intend to rename, and rename them. It may be helpful to print out the screen from the
Masking you will be using, so you can remember which fields are going to be hidden – so that
you don‟t bother with those.
Note that not only can you change the names of the fields – you can even change the name of
the modules themselves for many modules! On the Attributes tab of the Labels template,
the items under “Module” refer to the various forms of a Module Name used in the product –
abbreviations, plurals, and in the menu.
You won‟t believe how helpful it is to reduce the number of fields and improve the usability of
the system by relabeling it to match your existing business terminology!
Go from this….
Figure 13
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
…to this:
Figure 14
Note in the above, that many of the fields between Type and Scope of Work have been
removed, and that the module has been renamed to “Potential Change Orders” from “Cost
Events.”
Best Practice #5 – Use Workflow
People have a really hard time following processes. It‟s not because the
people are lazy or don‟t want to do things the right way, but because they have
a lot to do, and let‟s face it – some of our process are really complex. So, as a
result, we don‟t know about change orders pending, or statuses are not
updated properly – so we don‟t know what‟s happening in the field except as a
distant rear-view mirror.
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Good news: you can set up workflows in Constructware to systematize your processes. Now all
of the other setup you‟ve done to get your Cost Code Template, Ledger Template, and Cost and
Budget Statuses the way you need them will start to flow, because the workflows themselves
can manipulate that stuff for you. All the users have to do is create documents, and send them
around for approvals. We call this functionality “Routing,” and you can set up some really
complex workflows there.
Figure 15
Routes can be set up across your site (“client level”), or at the project level. To the extent
possible, I recommend setting them up at the site level and then copying them to projects if
there are special tweaks. It‟s just easier that way. You set these up in Maintenance Data
Maintenance > Module Customization on the Routing tab of a given module. The routes are
module-specific because they are able to manipulate the specifics of the modules, like the
contents of certain fields. As with the other areas, there is good online help for the step by step
guides, but here I‟ll try to let you know some important stuff to pay attention to.
First, when you create a Route, make sure you give it a name that is going to make sense to
your users. Don‟t just name it something like “Cost Event Route” unless it‟s the only route you‟re
going to create.
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
A few other things you need to decide on the
General tab (Figure 16) are:




Whether you‟re going to let anybody
change the document during the
route, or if it‟s just an “as-is” approval
flow.
Whether the document or form gets
locked at the end of the route. This
is good for Contracts or Purchase
Orders as you do not want anyone to
be able to change a contractual
commitment. It forces them to create
a Change Order.
Whether or not the person with ballin-court can send the document to
others for additional input, or even
delegate their responsibility to
respond.
What causes this route to get
selected or shown as an available
route? For example, you can have
one route for owner-requested
change orders, and another one for
changes originating in the field.
Figure 16
The Document Updates tab
(Figure 17) is another
important tab for automating
real-time cost visibility. This is
where you decide how the
route manipulates the
document under review or
workflow. For example, do
you want the Cost Status and
Budget Status set to certain
values based on the initiation
and completion of the
workflow? I strongly
Figure 17
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
recommend that you set this up – it is what will make the status changes invisible to the end
user while at the same time updating the information on the Cost to Complete report.
Finally, the workflows steps (Figure 18) themselves are set up on the Routing Steps tab. The
best tip I can give you here is that it‟s usually less clicks to set this up starting with the last step
in the route, ending with the first one. That way the „next step‟ for each step will generally
already exist while you‟re taking this step.
A few things to point out here:
 Give the step a
meaningful name.
 More importantly, write
meaningful instructions
for the user that will be
in this step. They‟ll often
receive the notification
out of the blue and
instructions make it
much easier.
 The Step Type
determines the
responses available to
the end user.
 Use Routing Roles
instead of specific users
in your setup, whenever
possible. This way, you
can put people in roles
on projects in the Project
Team and easily switch
them out.
 Reminders are great,
but don‟t get too overactive with them (like my
example).
 The Step Exit Conditions
are very important if you
want to have “intelligent”
Figure 18
routes that branch based
on the contents of the
document or form under review. Constructware evaluates the exit conditions top to
bottom, and the first one that‟s true will get executed.
With your routes set up, the users just have to click the “Route” button with a document
selected, pick the route they want to follow (if more than one is available) and submit it. Then,
the answers in the route or workflow will update the Cost Status and Budget Status – giving you
real time updates as to cost.
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Best Practice #6 – Integrate With ERP
Constructware can be integrated with your ERP or Accounting systems, and to eliminate
duplicate entry of data, you should do this. I‟m not trying to tell you you‟re wrong for not
integrating the two, but your users will sure appreciate not entering the same data in both
places. And your management will sure appreciate it when the data in the field matches the data
in your ERP system, including the latest information about pending change orders.
Integrating with your ERP system requires that you – or somebody who knows how to – write
some software to move data from Point A to Point B. The approach taken in Constructware is to
use XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a carrier for data. XML is nice because the data
elements are described in the tags, and it‟s very readable by humans. And, because the data is
described by tags around it, it‟s easy to only post and get the data you want, and the order of
fields is not important. I recommend hiring a firm that knows how to integrate Constructware
and accounting systems, like Jitterbit, because that makes it easy.
Constructware has been integrated with at least these accounting systems to date:





JD Edwards (World and One World)
SAP
GEAC
Timberline
Comdata (credit card transactions)





Star Builder
Computer Guidance (CGC)
Walker
Oracle Financials
Custom proprietary system
There may be others. Since it‟s such a loose coupling, unless the customer tells us what they‟re
integrating with, we won‟t know.
To make the project easiest, I recommend that you get people in Accounting and Operations in
the same room (oh, the horrors!) and decide what types of documents are going to be “owned”
by Constructware, and what types will originate in the ERP system. For example, are budgets
going to start in Constructware, or be inserted into Constructware? For that matter, are projects
going to start in Constructware, or be inserted there? You can see how there are lots of
decisions to make.
Then, take screen shots in each system, and map the fields together (Figure 19).
Figure 19
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
After that, you can map the fields together in what we creatively call a “Technical Field
Mapping”, where you can be sure the data types line up, and that you can really match the fields
together (Figure 20).
Figure 20
Only then should you have
a programmer start writing
the software that moves
the data. In reality, this
software is pretty easy to
write – and is already
written by folks like Jitterbit
– but if you haven‟t thought
through the mapping of
data on the business side,
there‟s no point in writing
software.
Figure 21
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Best Practice #7 – Auto Reports
Now that the cost management has
been configured for the project, the last
best practice is to give the users
preconfigured reports that will
automatically run at a predetermined
time. So instead of your users trying to
determine what reports to run, give
them a step up by creating auto
reports that they will need to run. It is
also a good idea to discuss this during
the project‟s kickoff meeting with
internal and external users to determine
timings (daily, weekly, or monthly) and
other reporting criteria. As with the
other areas, there is good online help
for the step by step guides, but here I‟ll
try to let you know some important stuff
to pay attention to.
Figure 22
Figure 22
First determine which reports you want to run. Here are a few examples:

Cost to Complete Report - Basic (Figure 23)
Figure 23
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®

Cost to Complete Report - Detailed (Figure 24 and 25)
Figure 24
Figure 25



Cost to Complete Report with certain columns hidden
Cost Events sorted by Status
Outstanding Events (Figure 26)
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Figure 26

Overdue Routes (Figure 27 and 28)
Figure 27
Figure 28
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®
Once you find a report to use continue to refine the
report by making changes on the detail page. Such
items to consider are (Figure 29):

Projects – Do you need to run the report on
more than one project.
Filtering – Are you looking for a certain
budget code or a specific company or contact
Sorting – Sort by number, Budget or Cost
Status
Display Options – Certain fields do not
automatically show on the report. You can
toggle which fields are displayed.
Report Header – Do you want your
company‟s logo to display on the report.
Would you rather have lines vs. the rows
being shaded.




Figure 29
Once you have the report looking good, you create the auto report by clicking. Once here there
are a couple of options:

Rename the report especially if creating several auto reports with the same report. For
example, Cost to Complete – Basic vs. Cost to Complete – Detailed
Figure 30

Who to you want the report to go to? When you add a user as a recipient, they will see
the report on the CW Desktop in the Auto Reports section every time the report runs.
Otherwise the user would have to “manually” run the report by navigating to the Auto
Reports tab.
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Best Practices for Real-Time Cost Control with Autodesk® Constructware®


How often (frequency) do
you want the reports to run?
Choices include Daily,
Weekly, Monthly or
Manually. Manual frequency
means that you must view
the Auto Report manually
from the Auto Reports tab.
What day do you want the
reports to run. For example
if you want the report to run
every Monday, then choose
a date that falls on a Monday.
Figure 31
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