6. Different body involved in preparation of estimate can be grouped into following three
classes.
• The owner or owner's staff such as project manager.
• Contractor's personnel such as senior manager, planner, site management staffs etc.
• Materials suppliers and contractors
7. Challenges in Estimating
• To co-ordinate different parties involved in the project or construction in particular
• An estimator has to understand the project details, study drawing and
specification, obtain working conditions, labour and equipment productivity and
collecting other data from the site
• An estimator also assesses the temporary work at the site such as formwork for
concreting, temporary plant for the storage of materials.
8. Data for Estimate:
• DRAWINGS- plan, elevations and detailed drawings to scale are required. Scale
1cm -1m, for detailed it should be scaled to 1cm to 10 cm,
• SPECIFICATIONS- i) general specifications
ii) detailed specifications
• RATES- rates per unit of various items of work, the rates of various materials to be
used in the construction, different wages of labour, skilled or unskilled as mason,
carpenter, mazdoor, bhishti etc. location of work and its distance from source of
materials and the cost of transport should be known.
Rates can be obtained rom P.W.D schedule of rate book.
9. In the organization, background work for estimation is carried out by higher management and
organizations keeps the details regarding unit cost of the items called schedule of rate,
productivity, and guideline for basic calculation.The basic calculation is carried out by junior
level engineers or assistants.
In preparing detailed estimate, we need to know the following two things
• Quantities of the items involved.
• Obtaining cost of the items involved.
Methods of obtaining quantities of the items involved is called quantity estimate and method
obtaining unit cost of the items involved is called rate analysis.
10. Types of Estimate:
• Preliminary estimate.
• Detailed estimate or item rate estimate
• Plinth area estimate
• Approximate quantity method estimate
• Revised estimate
• Supplementary estimate
• Annual repair or maintenance estimate
11. Requirements of preliminary and detailed estimate:
To prepare a preliminary estimate, quantity of work to be planned is measured in terms of unit of
person, built up area, extent of work in kilometre such as a preliminary estimate of housing can be
calculated based on type of house and number of house to be built. Similar preliminary estimate of
highway can be calculated by knowing the type of road in terms of lane or pavement and length of
the load.
Preliminary Estimate
Different methods of preliminary estimate can be grouped into the following categories –
• Time referenced cost estimate
• Cost capacity factor
• Component ration/installation cost ratio
• Parameter cost
The preliminary estimate is obtained during early phases of project. As the project progresses, an
estimate keeps on getting refined and lastly we get definitive estimate.