Great for payroll & equipment entries/tracking.

Easy for the field to enter hours for men/equipment. Uploads into payrolls system effortlessly. Great reporting options.

Pros

Fantastic for entering man/equipment hours, daily reports, daily pictures, and notes. The field easily enters their daily crew information which eventually is imported into our payroll system. HCSS has worked well with the past two payroll systems we've had. Infinate categories/types for hours...active/idle/holiday. Lots of options for attachments, notes, etc. Within a short amount of time it is easy to use. Great reporting options.

Cons

User friendly after about a month of use (tough at first). Sometimes there's too many choices, too many ways to do one thing. Doesn't play nice with all softwares but has a stronghold on some. They need work work on updating the capabilities of the software. Many years have gone by with not much updated/changed.

Great Software, Better Customer Service

I have worked with the software for approximately 1 1/2 years. As we are a smaller firm with a specialized field of construction, in my opinion, we are only utilizing a small portion of the available features as this serves our needs. I would imagine that an estimator from a larger firm who is more involved with general contractor and large estimating teams would have a more substantial grasp of the true capabilities than myself.

Pros

The software features a full suite of capabilities that makes my estimating simpler and more precise. The reporting functions are very in-depth and well presented for others to review. Once set up, the ability to have "one click" bid items that populate all required resources save us considerable amounts of time.

Cons

The software has a steep learning curve as there are so many features and functions. I would recommend anyone who is new to HCSS Heavybid to read through the available resources to get a grasp on the software. I had the luxury of learning from a senior member of staff, but this may not be available to all.

HCSS Estimating

HCSS is my favorite Estimating software. Support is the best. It is a bit pricey, but worth the money. More companies use HCSS the any other software, so Joint Ventures are so much easier when sharing estimates.

Pros

User functions are endless. Creating databases, and adjusting crews and materials is flawless. Ability to create multiple databases based on areas of the country or state are a key feature. Creating work tasks and work items are a key feature. Ability to adjust and rename materials within a bid are a great feature. Global changes to the estimate are easy, and having a final bid checklist is great.

Cons

You can only have 3 children under each bid item. Which means you need to organize each bid item into a maximum amount of 3 levels. Sometimes there are times when having more levels would be helpful.

Overall a good experience with heavy job. For implementation, the software is user friendly.

The heavy job software overall is a good project management software for small to medium sized companies. I continue to find new options and interfaces with other industry software which is great but I would like to see more one on one training opportunities to leverage those options. The tech support group has been great to deal with and I have always ended a conversation with an answer which is hard to find in the industry. My main idea for heavy job for my company is to interface with primavera P6 from heavy bid in order to generate a WBS and CBS structure that can be utilized in a resource loaded baseline schedule for a project. From there I would like to see an interface with heavy job and P6 to generate as-built schedules based on productions entered daily in heavy job. This would be a great tool to head off claim or dispute resolutions.

Best taking software in construction

We use it to track out time, document change orders and Rework. I keeps the cost codes clean and accurate.

Pros

The crew foreman have been able to pick this up fairly easily and use it as is intended to be used. We get quality notes from the foreman and are able to accurately track the time with the proper pay items. it is especially helpful on time and material pay items. I love that I am able to document the work and have the customer sign off on the work at the end of the day. It makes change orders easy to track as well as rework. This has helped us give better estimates because of the higher quality of cost tracking. It makes keeping the budget clean so much easier.

Cons

I have not found any cons with heavy job at this point.