JLC Online: Material estimating can be one of the most tedious yet critical tasks for builders and remodelers. It’s a familiar task: printing plans, using a ruler and calculator to measure based on the scale, and with notebook at my side, manually calculating the quantities needed for each project.
3 comments:
This software is interesting to read about and I wondered how applicable it would be to our usage. I feel as though scenery is extremely similar per show but hardly ever the same. For other industries it will constantly be the same types of molding and trim, the same construction over and over; for scenery this is far less standard. I do absolutely see the use for things like stock scenery or other scenic units of that nature, but is that enough to make it become something like an industry standard? Or would it only be utilized be certain sectors of the industry (ex: academia vs regional vs commercial fabrication). The feature where it automatically puts a price on your measured amount is also cool, but formulated spreadsheets can do just about the same thing. Same thing with the labor feature – this one was also really cool, but a spreadsheet formula can also automate how long it takes to do a task…
I was thinking during Production Management why there wasn’t some sort of CMU database app to make material estimates while we were doing a rocket ship flat assignment practicing searching and finding prices for certain types and shapes of wood and hardware. I think having a customizable tool like Stack would enable companies to put in their locations and regional prices to consistently source materials from would make jobs like estimation across all fields would make estimation go exponentially faster. One limitation is that if certain warehouses are having sales or changes in deals I wonder if stack could lead you to more expensive decisions. I also wonder how fast/if Stack can update changes in price and inflation on things like wood and be able to process bulk changes of prices. In the end I think it’s a really cool development that would be very useful to the theatre industry.
This program looks crazy powerful, and of course I wonder how well it would adapt to being used for theater (particularly rocket ship flats). It’s so interesting to see such an advanced piece of technology like this. I can only imagine how functional it actually is – I got the feeling that the author couldn’t fully describe all of Stack’s features with an article ten times longer, like if you were asked to describe anything AutoCad can do. It sounds like the program is built to be very modular and adaptable, and I think that with a little work, it would integrate really well into estimating for theater. I’d like to know more about how it estimates labor, but I’m sure it’s just as powerful as estimating 1x3. I think the school of drama should try using Stack with its free trial to see how it works with theater. I’m sure it would save a lot of time.
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