Archicad > Winest

[Anonymous]

I know, I ask a lot of questions. The company I am with is a design build firm. I convinced everyone that our current estimating system (80% manual) was lacking and after a lot of research we purchased an estimating package called Winest. It's major competitor is Timberline. Winest is a very flexible database driven spreadsheet. I am in the process of the ground-up construction of our company's cost database (A huge undertaking). This database includes all of our labor, materials and some subcontractor pricing. Winest is setup to import information from VISIO, Chief Architect and Archicad. The user still has to setup a filter of some sort to make it work. When configured properly it could be a great combination! Has anyone done this before? Like I said, I ask a lot of questions. I don't demand answers, just like interesting conversation
Cheers!

[stefan]

Never heard of it, but you should keep the list informed about any process you make. Others might follow you.

[Djordje]

Flamer wrote:
I know, I ask a lot of questions. The company I am with is a design build firm. I convinced everyone that our current estimating system (80% manual) was lacking and after a lot of research we purchased an estimating package called Winest. It's major competitor is Timberline.

Don't quote me on this, but I seem to remember that once upon a time there was (or still is) an API that links ArchiCAD and Timberline.

However, it only works as well as you set it up; even "plain" Excel can do wonders, and there are other tools, too ...

[Anonymous]

Good Ol' Times....

The first ArchiCAD-> WinEst interface was part of the Builders' Edition version in 5.0 and 6.0. For the US 7.0 version all the content work of the Builders' edition was merged into the standard 7.0/residential default.

The scheme worked by defining property objects set up according to WinEst residential database ASSEMBLIES which then could be assigned to Wall/Slab composites.

A fossil remainder of this is still in the US default template: the Wall Composite definition "Wall Stud ext 2x6(6108)" for example is created to be corresponding to the WinEst assembly (guess what number:) #6108.

It worked with a predefined ELEMENT LIST from the calculate menu, exporting the text file - that was the file ArchiCAD import function imported in WinEST.

Later on we figured out a somewhat simpler interface via the COMPONENT LISTS and the WinEST GetElements menu command, where the line items were generated from ArchiCAD and imported into WinEST.

WinEST itself is indeed a user friendly functional equivalent to Timberline, with work breakdown, accounting interface, etc. and the comany itself is a goup of nice folks with dynamic agenda and good ideas, good listeners too.

There is a lot of folklore info about the ups and downs of the cooperation between ArchiCAD and WinEst, but that's not really interesting here.

IFC and Timberline somewhat seemed to have more marketing "pull", but IMHO WinEst was as good an estimator than Timberline (arguably easier to use), offered comparable or better databases (of course both of them offered the RS Means ones).

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the reply. I am looking foward to setting up the connection between the two programs. I am building our database and assembly's from the ground up. I suspect this will mean I have to manualy connect each composite to an assembly in winest. I just purchased both programs and only have time to work on them between my other duties so it might be a slow process. I will post my progress on this site for others who are interested.