Catalog and Setup

Within the Aspire system, a service defines work that a field service company performs on behalf of its customers. It is not unusual for any given field service company to offer a hundred or more different services. A few services a field service company could do include Weekly Maintenance, Irrigation Repairs, Plant Installation, Steel Edging Installation, Snow Plowing, etc.

In Aspire, the service catalog represents the list of services that the company provides to its customers and that can be included in an estimate. Services must exist in the service catalog before they can be added to an estimate.

Managing Service Types

Service types are used to classify services and associate each service with a division. They allow a more detailed breakdown of the P&L than what is provided by divisions but are not as granular as services. Service types must be defined before they can be added to services. Divisions within the organization must be defined in Aspire before you can set up service types. Divisions are defined on the Admin List Division screen.

Service types are created and managed from the Admin List Service Type screen.

Managing Services

Services are created and managed by the Services Search List screen. The list of services defined and managed here represents the service catalog.

Managing Service Schedules

When a contract opportunity is won, Aspire generates work tickets for each occurrence of every service on the contract for up to two years. Each work ticket has an anticipated start date that can be used to forecast the workload in future months. Service Schedules defined for each service help Aspire to know how to set the anticipated start date of each work ticket it generates so that the work represented by those tickets is appropriately distributed over time.

Service schedules can be defined for each service. For any given service, multiple service schedules can be defined based on the number of occurrences per year for the service on a given contract. For example, a mowing service might have two service schedules – one used when 26 occurrences are anticipated per year, and another for 52 occurrences per year. You establish service schedules when you create a service.

Managing Catalog Items

Within the Aspire system, a catalog item is specific labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, other items, or kit that is required to estimate and perform a service. Catalog items are managed from the Items Search List screen.

While managing catalog items, it may be useful to export the entire item catalog or some specific subset to a spreadsheet for broader analysis or planning.

Guidance for Plant Items

When providing service to install plants, it is common to require a common set of materials and amount of labor to perform the installation on multiple plants. Kits allow you to bundle the necessary items together for much easier estimating. Aspire further provides a capability called auto kitting which is useful for building many similar kits for multiple selected plants at the same time. Guidance for setting up items to be used when auto kitting is provided in the section Auto Kitting Guidelines.

Guidance for Equipment Items

Equipment items are used to capture costs associated with the rental of equipment.

When setting up equipment rental items, it is best for the purchase units and allocation units to be time-based. For example, an hour or day. It is also good practice to determine purchase units based on how the rental vendor provides the equipment. So, if the rental equipment provider rents out a certain piece of equipment by the hour, hours are the appropriate purchase allocation unit.

Some companies who seek to capture costs associated with the equipment they own will set up an item category called Company Owned, and then set up items based on the estimated hourly cost to operate their equipment and associate those items with the Company Owned category.

Kits

Kits provide a mechanism to combine items to consistently estimate based on a unit of measure associated with standard production rates. Kits support translation from property takeoff unit measures to individual item units to allow Aspire to calculate single or multiple item costs into a final kit cost and price. For contract estimating, if you properly established takeoffs, and provided the takeoff values for each property, Aspire will be able to automatically calculate the cost and customer price for contract opportunities.

Kit Examples

Example #1 – Mowing

This example requires setting up two items: one labor item and one kit.

Units for labor are specified in hours and the cost is calculated based on dollars per hour. For mowing, you might estimate the time required for work based on square feet knowing that with a 52” mower, a laborer can mow 40,000 square feet per hour and that the hourly cost is $17. Based on this understanding, you would set up a Maintenance Labor item with units specified as hours and a cost of $17 per hour. Then you would set up a Mow with a 52-inch kit specifying units of square feet. Within that kit, you would include the single item, Maintenance Labor, with a price calculation factor of 40,000 square feet/hour.

When estimating a mowing job, you will be able to place the Mowing with 52-inch kit on a service for the job. Assuming that you have set up takeoffs for the property, Aspire will know how many square feet of the property can be mowed with a 52” mower, and can thus calculate the cost, and apply appropriate markups and net profit to determine the price to the customer.

In this case, there is only one item in the kit, but the kit allows the estimate to be based on square feet instead of hours. Because square feet are measurable for any property, estimating based on square feet will provide more consistent estimates among multiple estimators in the organization.

Example #2 – Tree Planting

This example requires setting up five items: one labor item and four material items. This example demonstrates setting up a kit within a kit.

Suppose that you want to prepare to estimate tree plantings. To plant a tree, you need a tree of the proper variety and size, ¼ yard of mulch, tree stakes, and 1 ½ hours of labor. Because labor and support materials (mulch and pine fines) are the same for any tree of a certain size, regardless of its variety, you want to bundle those items together in a sub-kit. Here’s the summary of items you will create:

1. “Mulch Bulk” material item units=yard
2. “Enhancement Labor” labor item units=hours
3. “Canada Red Cherry” material item units=10 gallon
4. “Japanese Maple” material item units=10 gallon
5. “Tree Stakes” material item
6. “Plant 20 Gallon Tree” kit item (sub kit) units=10 Gallon; comprised of:

1. Enhancement labor item
2. Mulch material item
3. Tree Stakes material item

7. “Canada Red Cherry – Plant 10 Gallon Tree” kit item units=10 gallon; comprised of:

   1. “Canada Red Cherry” with units of 20 gallons
   2. “Plant 10 Gallon Tree”

8. “Japanese Maple – Plant 10 Gallon Tree” kit item units=10 gallon; comprised of:

   1. “Japanese Maple” with units of 10 gallons
   2. “Plant 10 Gallon Tree”

Given the above items, only #7 or #8 will typically be placed on an estimate – the plant materials should have their Available to Bid checkbox left unchecked so that they will not show up when estimating. When either item #7 or #8 is included in an estimate, Aspire will automatically include the other items beneath them as part of the estimate.

Auto Kitting

In example #2 above, you can see that creating the installation kits for each tree could require much effort if you have many types of trees. Aspire provides a feature that allows you to bulk-create kits for many materials at the same time by combining individual items (i.e. trees or shrubs) with a sub-kit that provides for their installation.

For example, suppose that the company has 366 different types of #3-size shrubs for which you desire to create installation kits. For each one, the installation kit will be comprised of the individual shrub and a sub-kit including the proper items for all #3-size shrub plantings. The name of the newly created kits will be comprised of the individual item name appended with the name of the sub-kit.

Before beginning the auto kit process, the 366 #3-size shrub items and the single kit for #3-size shrub plantings must exist.

Auto Kitting Procedure

This section demonstrates how to use the auto kit function to create installation kits for 366 shrubs.

1. Navigate to the Items subsection of the Administration.
2. You must ensure that you have created the appropriate catalog items as explained in the paragraphs above.
3. Set the search list filter for the Items screen. In this case, we specify the following filters:
   Active = Yes, Category Name in “Shrubs”, Allocation Unit Type in “3 gal”, Item Type in “Materials.” You can see below the fields that we have chosen to display.

4. Scroll through the list to ensure that the items selected are the ones expected.
5. To select all items in the list, click the checkmark box in the header.
6. Choose the Auto Kit option from the Bulk Actions menu in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

7. On the Auto Kit screen, select another item to be combined with the selected items to create the new kits. Typically, the item selected on this screen will be a kit that becomes a sub-kit of each of the new kits being created.
8. Note that if the Enhanced Branch Admin Security option is enabled for the system, then the Auto Kit screen will have an additional Assigned Branch field to specify the branches for which the new kits will be available.

Auto Kitting Guidelines

When defining items in the item catalog, the following guidelines will provide the best results when you later include the items in an auto kit.

1. Naming Sub-kits – The names Aspire assigns to kits created by the auto kit process will combine the name of the individual items and the name of the sub-kit. Choosing a name like “Installed” for the sub-kit can yield a meaningful name. For example, if one of the individual items is Oak Tree, then the new kit name would become “Oak Tree - Installed.” You can have multiple sub-kit items with the same name (i.e. “Installed”). You will be able to differentiate them based on the units.

2. Specifying Allocation Units – To set up for use of auto kitting, when creating tree or bush items, specify an item allocation unit type that identifies the plant size such as trunk diameter or root gallons. For example, you might include three pin oak material items in the catalog for 1”, 3”, and 5” diameter trunks.

3. Naming Items – When naming the material items that will be included in auto kits, it is recommended that the size should not be included in the item name because Aspire always makes the allocation unit available in places where you are required to select materials, so including the units make the name unnecessarily long.

4. Setting “Available to Bid” – Once the individual items have been included in kits, it is common for companies to prevent personnel from assigning the individual plant items outside the

context of the kit.  Prevent this by marking each of the individual items as “not available to bid” so that they will not be available in the selection list when creating an estimate for a new opportunity. Right after you complete the auto kit function, the individual items are all still selected on the Items screen. You can quickly mark them all as “Not available to bid” by using the Bulk Edit option in the Gear menu in the bottom right corner.