Subcontractor Groups (including NECA) sign on with buildingSMART Alliance

Autodesk University – coverage

BIMboy blogs on Autodesk U

Blogging can boost visibility (written for home builders)

Social Media strategy (written for home builders)

New commerce site – BidForMaterials.com

BIM Project Execution Guide (download)

McGraw-Hill report on BIM (download 52p PDF)

Can we measure the ROI of BIM? (opinion piece)

BIM Special Section – Construction.com.

Turner on BIM + Lean Construction

Dumb things smart people do when testing electricity

Control wiring primer (from Lighting Control Assn.)

Energy Matters newsletter (23p PDF – from DoE)

Forecast: Energy management systems to get hot

Best practices for retainage (from AGC)

To learn more about Trade Service's new Internet-based TRA-SER SX, click this link and take their
narrated tour.

To learn more about Supplier Xchange, please click here and take a narrated tour.

Standard training classes set for our Chandler, AZ offices are scheduled for Jan. 6-8, Feb. 3-5, Feb. 17-19, and Feb. 24-26.

An Advanced class in AZ is set for Jan. 28-29.

The next Standard class set for Columbia, MD will be held February 17th – 19th.

Click here for the complete list of upcoming training classes including 2010 training dates

Training can be "suit-cased" to your facility. We can tailor our training to your needs. Ask us about customized training at your site!

Call to register for any of the above classes, including those in Maryland: 1-800-444-4890.

We've posted training dates, directions to our training facilities, and registration forms on our Web page. Click the "Education" button on our home page, or go directly to this link: Education

Contractor Wilcox Saves Time,

Reduces Paper

With Solutions From McCormick

Congratulations To Greg Haren!

Version 9.2 releasing!

What’s New In Your System
Version 9.2

Your JOB SCREEN offers more functionality.

Previous versions limited you to two tabs (“active” and “inactive” jobs). Now, you can add up to 20.

Example: You can have tabs with headings by the estimators in your department (tabs named Tom, Dick, and Harry). Or you could have tabs that break down your past jobs by year (2009, 2008, 2007, etc.). OR: If your company has several offices (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Bayonne, and Camden), or even job type (residential, commercial, hospitals, bids won, bids lost, etc.) These tabs can be re-arranged and also marked invisible to hide older jobs to reduce clutter and still have the jobs available.

Create Job Details Linked With BidSummary

Now you can create Job Details that are linked to your bid summary information. These details can be assigned to the job screen and displayed along with job name lead estimator etc. This is also covered by security and you can force all users to view the same set of detail columns, this allows you to have the project managers and owners view the square foot price and final sell price of all jobs, while hiding these specs from the standard estimators.

Traser SX integration.

You can now validate any existing UPC/DCI code to see if it does not exist within Traser’s system. This will help you flush out any items that are discontinued or otherwise invalid. With 9.2 and Traser SX users can now set up the Price updating to be run unattended, this allows you to set it to kick off once a week and view the log files at your leisure. These report files are now stored as internal files that are kept so you can look at past reports without worrying about printing them at the time you did the update.

Trade Service’s Supplier Exchange

Note that SX is not the same as Supplier Exchange (a new service from Trade Service). You can now use this with McCormick’s estimating software to evaluate prices from multiple suppliers. You can even “cherry pick,” if you like, the prices from each supplier. This does away with running price update files emailed to you from your supplier, with Supplier Exchange this is handled by Trade Service, all you need to worry about is your bid.

Other new capabilities

Labor Group creation – it’s now easier. As you begin to create a new Group, the program will ask you if you’d like to copy an existing group. Extension report order sorting – there will now be arrows allowing you to sort the order of these reports. If you like, move the most-used reports to the top; drop all the ones you don’t use to the bottom. Update NECA labor units – you can now update all three NECA labor levels with your Traser price update. This eliminates the need to go through the database every few years.



McCormick System's CAD Estimating works with the latest verison of AutoCad 2010



From The President’s Desk:

It’s Going To Be A Good Year For All Of Us

In the midst of a lot of confusing and mixed-to-more-mixed predictions about the national economy in 2010, and what construction will or won’t do, we at McCormick Systems are pretty optimistic about next year specifically and the future in general. Please be assured, I’ve not mutated into Little Miss Mary Sunshine. There are solid reasons to be positive about our collective future: If your company is one that has done the smart things in business (and I count implementing our system as a savvy move), you’ve positioned yourself to survive. That belief tells me that our customer base will be around on the other side of whatever it is we’re living through right now. You’ll be one of those ready to thrive. I’m not the only one who is leaning toward a positive future, judging by what we saw this past fall at The NECA Show and the IEC Electric Expo. Contractors showed up! We talked to a lot of people like you (our customers), and of course some new prospects as well. These events were not empty. Contractors know they can learn, add products and tools to their standard “kit” – and go forward and succeed. This is no small thing, and would make anyone who attended both events an optimist! Electrical industry software is far from a static thing. With technological advances and construction industry advances (such as BIM), great things are happening right now. We at McCormick are fully engaged in our piece of your business – adding knowledge and information, getting ready for a better future. This is the time of year at which we need to grant ourselves just a little time for introspection – a few moments to sit back and be thankful for all that we are lucky enough to have. Things that we at McCormick feel very fortunate about are the high quality of you, our customers, and the fact that we – every day – get the opportunity to pursue interesting work. We've been allowed to live in a world in which, if we do our jobs well, we can help you to provide structures with better electrical systems and to pursue your goals. That keeps us on our toes, excited to come to work every day. It's work that offers daily positive feedback! Perhaps there’s something more ambitious or lucrative for which we should be wishing. But from our standpoint, there’s no better prospect than those two essentials with which to enter a new year.

Happy Holidays! Todd McCormick, President


 



2010 User's Conference -
Mark Your Calendar!

We've chosen the Tempe Mission Palms (Tempe, AZ) for our User's Conference -- to be held March 17-20, 2010.

Early bird registrations qualify for a discount; the deadline is Jan 4, 2010.
Download the single-page registration form.



Items posted to www.eleblog.com

Politics + Electricity = Death I didn't create the headline on this item -- Greg Smith, blogging over at the IAEI Magazine site, did. Here's a snippet from his diatribe (which is wonderful -- you really ought to click over and read the thing): In a series of summits and hearings, there were two distinct sides. On one side were electrical safety experts; on the other side, were people ignorant about electrical safety. The experts included professional engineers, electrical inspectors / NEC Code experts, electrical contractors, testing laboratory engineers and other knowledgeable individuals. The ignorant-about-electrical-safety side included Chamber of Commerce spokespeople, a manufacturer facility manager, and an economic development director. Their “Code expert” was a man who invented a way to get cat urine out of carpet. When the electrical safety experts stood up to testify, the attorney for the manufacturing facility could only try to sidetrack the discussion with attempts to suppress important technical information. It was fascinating and disgusting to see the amoral tactics used by the attorney, to see the “end justifying the means.” In short, the question is: Why can't people do the right thing? And the answer is . . . because we're not as honest as, say, chimps, elephants, or mole rats.

Can you afford the lowest bid?

That's the question asked by Jim Slack, Jr., on a blog (it's from Slack & Co., a contractor). He wrote: Sadly, a truth exists in our industry that is becoming harder and harder to ignore: there are subcontractors who are intentionally submitting incomplete estimates so they will be the lowest price on bid day. They know that being the low bid means they win work. As long as there is a feeling among subcontractors that price is the only factor general contractors consider, the bidding game will continue to be played dishonestly. Not only does this behavior tarnish the integrity of our industry, but it also ultimately hurts projects and owners. Action must be taken on both sides of the equation to improve the bidding process. General contractors must ensure they are comparing scopes of work when reviewing bids. And subcontractors must remember their responsibility to be good stewards of the owner’s money—meaning they must in good faith, present a bid that is complete to the best of their knowledge. This was timely when he wrote it (back in April) -- and it's even more appropriate to think about right now.




Conference Reports -- WEEC

The World Energy Engineering Congress was held Nov. 4-6 here in Washington, D.C. I attended each day. Four reports were posted to TEDMAG.com, and I think I did a pretty good job of reporting -- which means (freely translated) . . . you might want to read this stuff. 1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s keynote; Leviton's breakfast; a bit about green jobs. 2. How lighting fits into a vision of The Smart Grid. 3. I attended a session on the World's Greenest Building. It wasn't hype (and I got a surprise). 4. Misc. stuff from WEEC, focus on Toyota's Approach to Lighting.