Name: Mastering the Art of the BOE Workflow: Standardization that Delivers
Uploaded: 2026-04-23T16:30:56.633Z
Duration: 32 min 16 s
Description: Mastering the Art of the BOE Workflow: Standardization that Delivers

Transcript for "Mastering the Art of the BOE Workflow: Standardization that Delivers": Hello, everyone. I'm Daniel Schickel, senior solutions engineer for Deltek. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. Before I get started, I have a few administrative items to know. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. If you have a question, please type it into the q and a box anytime during the presentation. We will address as many questions as we can at the conclusion of the webinar. Any questions left unanswered will be addressed individually offline following today's presentation. Resources, including the presentation slides, are available for you to download in the resources tab on your screen. You will also receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Whether you're here because BOEs are a critical part of your role or because you're tired of slow manual or error prone estimating processes, you're absolutely in the right place. Today, we're gonna talk about mastering the BOE workflow and more specifically, how to do that using a tool called BOE Pro. What we'll cover today is what a templatized BOE workflow looks like, how a BOE workflow keeps us compliant and audit ready, and how a workflow leads to consistent and more accurate BOEs. Let's jump right in. For those of you who are hearing the name BOE Pro for the first time, this tool is a propricer companion product, which allows me to templatize my BOEs, my BOE workflow, set estimators against a responsibility assignment matrix, giving them access only to the proposal elements in which they are required to capture. I can create a BOE library for streamlined BOE reuse in future projects. And with AI capabilities, I can set a scoring criteria that my BOE users must score their text against. With a one click submit, all the data captured in BOE Pro will be submitted to contractor edition for further reporting and analysis by my pricers. First, let's take a look at what a BOE template looks like in BOE Pro, and then we'll see what a user following a standardized BOE workflow looks like. First, I'll log in as a system administrator. At a very high level, I'll show the BOE workflow that I've assigned for this proposal. First, I'll jump into the properties of a proposal that I created specifically for this webinar. I've created BOE sections that may or may not need to be used amongst my different BOEs, and those are always gonna be triggered by the estimating method that my user selects. If they select engineering judgment, it may populate a rationale and general note section. If they select historical, it may populate historical references and general notes. We refer to this as smart sections, and it verifies that your subsections are always relevant to the estimating method that's being used. I can further define these sections by leaving instructions for my users, entering header and footer information to make sure we have uniform BOEs when we spit this out in the cost volume, and any other default values that need to be present in all BOEs can get entered here. This makes it easier on my users to log in, enter their additional data to whatever base data is in this BOE, and then move on about their day. The workflow I've set up here is four steps. My BOE authors come in, do the BOE writing and estimating. I have a reviewer come in who reviews it, and then a final approval. And my last step is a submit to CE step, where everything is locked out until we submit this over to contractor edition. I'm able to make a couple other validations here, so I can make sure that those required sections that are assigned to my estimating methods are completed before pushing to the review step. This makes sure that our reviewers don't log in and don't have anything to review. Those sections must be completed before moving to the review step, which I've identified here. As well as we wanna make sure anytime we calculate hours, they've been assigned as an estimate to the proposal. That's what this last validation does. I can't push through the workflow process until my required sections are completed and all hours, units, and costs have been assigned as an estimate to the proposal. The final part of my workflow is a responsibility assignment matrix, where I've set up my different bid groups against the WBF structure, and I've assigned them to the different elements that they need access to. In our case, we're going to sign in as an estimator who's doing inputs on WBS one and WBS one one seven, and I've identified this user in the cells correlating to these different elements. I've sent out email notifications as well, so users will receive an email showing them what step of the workflow process that they need to log in at and for which different WBS elements. I'll log out of the workflow setup and log back in as an estimator. I'll go ahead and put in my estimator's email and password and log back in. Logged in as the estimator, I'm just gonna navigate back to my proposal section. We'll see the proposal that we've been given access to. And by by selecting the BOE view here, we'll get a list of only the elements that we've been assigned to. So we can already see the workflow guardrails in place here. I'm gonna come down to this engineering hours task and write a new BOE. First, I'm prompted to create a new BOE, or if I had a library of BOEs I wanted to pull from, I'll have an option to pull them from here, knowing that we have a nice scrutinized BOE from a previous project, we can pull into a new one. We're gonna create from scratch here, and we can see the auto naming feature working here. This verifies that all the BOE names will be uniform and have some naming convention to them that we've approved. Next part of the workflow was first selecting an estimating method to get the BOE template that needs to be completed. So in the sections tab here, I'm going to drop this down, and we're gonna go with engineering judgment. Engineering judgment populates the rationale and general notes section. To write my BOE, I'm gonna come inside the rationale section here, and I can certainly start from scratch and and start a brand new BOE typing directly into the screen here. But what I'm gonna do just for time saving purposes and copy and paste a BOE from Word directly into BOE Pro. Couple of things I wanna point out about this BOE is first, I have formulas that I've entered in here. So you've called out a amount of a labor category times and amount of months or hours, and it's going to calculate whatever the resulting hours are through AI in the system here. I'm doing this for both a senior and a junior engineer. And once all that text is present, I simply select my AI generating formulas option here, and it's gonna extract both of the formulas that it recognized. And it's gonna assign those hours to a resource that's made available to my estimator in this proposal, both a senior and a junior engineer. Since it's doing the math for me, it knows that it's going to assign six hundred and forty hours to both of these resources within the BOE that I'm writing, these these, estimates. So I can simply select save here, and it's going to assign those as estimates to the proposal. We can certainly verify that by coming to the direct tab here, and I can see both my junior and senior engineer estimates here. I can see it assigned six hundred and forty hours, and I can dive deeper into these if I needed to. I can go into show details here, and I can see how those hours are time phased. I can discreetly spread these six forty month by month, or I can front load or back load these hours with some of the other options in BOE Pro. Go ahead and close this for now and jump back into the BOE sections here. I had mentioned earlier that we can put our BOEs up against some criteria and get a score. Now that I've written my BOE here, if I wanna know if this is strong enough to push on for a review, I'll be able to select the get score feature here. This is hooked up to my organization's large language model, where we've set scoring criteria to run this BOE through. You'll see here, some of these I've gotten a high score on. So the completeness analysis, things like challenge and challenge analysis need some work. And when I select the drop down here, this will show me what I meant, what the actual criteria is, as well as some improvement tips for anything that didn't get a high score here. I can review this criteria, and I can go through and keep updating my text until I hit a specific threshold that we deem acceptable. Once we meet that criteria, I am now at this point good to log out of the system, entered my BOE. I reviewed the estimates here. I completed my workflow step. Now I'll advance this to the next step of the workflow, which in this case will be the review step. So I'll go ahead and log out. And I'll log back in as my reviewer and approval, which is done in the same step in my workflow. From here, again, I'll jump to the proposal section. I'll select the proposal, and I could jump back into the BOE view here, but in a review step, I may be more likely to jump to something like the BOE list, which will consolidate all my BOEs in one place in the system. If I scroll over to the right here a bit, I'll be able to see my previous three BOEs are already finalized and ready to be submitted to CE, and we're currently sitting in the review step of this BOE here. I could jump to that BOE from here if I wanted to go in and manually do that review through the different sections here, and then I'll have options through that review. We'll say in this case, we were reviewing the rationale and the formulas here. We We wanted to review some of the estimates. I then be able to determine if I wanna advance this or reject this back to the first step. Because this is tied into email notifications, if I was to reject this, another email would be sent out to the BOE author giving them the reason why this was rejected, and they'd be able to log in and make the updates. For us today, I'm just gonna go ahead and advance this through. We'll go to our final approval step, and then we'll advance this one more time after approval to our submit to CE step. I'll go ahead and unlock this one more time to finalize it. We'll click okay here. And now this BOE is set ready to go, and we'd be able to submit this to CE. Another thing a reviewer may do in the system, if I jump back to our BOE list here, is utilize things like our BOE list chart. So as I'm going through and doing my review here, if I wanna consolidate, again, all the BOEs in one place here, I can use things like this BOE list chart to determine what percentage of these BOEs are engineering judgment versus historical versus parametric bids, all from one spot here. So if you wanted to, I can kick some of these out and and say, you know, we've exceeded our threshold for engineering judgment, for instance. So before I push through the workflow to the next step, I have the ability to do some analysis on the data that I currently have and how it needs to be modified to make it to the next step and be successful on finally getting to our our final approval step and eventually submitted over to CE. Another thing in this list chart that's important to speak on here is the ability to save these BOEs. So I know once you have a strong BOE, maybe it's a project that you continually do over and over, we can save those BOEs in this system we're working in today, BOE Pro, simply by finding a BOE that was approved and selecting the save disk here to save it back to the library. So that easy. We're able to now, in the future, create a proposal and pull that scrutinized BOE into a new project. With our BOEs already sitting in the submit to CE step, really the last part here is getting this data pushed over to contractor edition so I can show one more important process in the workflow. I'll go ahead and select submit to CE here. I'm gonna go ahead and enter a username and password and select submit. And this, in just about real time, is gonna kick this proposal over to contractor addition to my pricers. We don't need to go deep into contractor edition itself. For now, I just wanna explain that we can see the estimates that were kicked over to the pricers. And if I come to the BOE tab here, they'll have read only access to the text, so they'll be able to review the different formulas, all the text, any attachments that we may have. And more importantly, they're gonna get this green flag that lets the price or know nothing has changed since this since this came over from BOE Pro. However, in a real life scenario again, sometimes we need to go through and make updates to these estimates. So for my engineers here, I had six hundred and forty hours for both a junior and a senior engineer. What if I needed to increase these hours for this estimate to eight hundred? I can still make that update here. It'll reprice and calculate on the fly, but when I come to the BOE tab, it's gonna give me a red flag. This lets me know we're out of sync. We wanna make sure there's a workflow and process where when these things happen, one, we can catch it, and two, we can easily make the updates to get to a new version of our proposal. To do that, what I do after making any updates to a proposal as the price are here is I mark this proposal as the current version. This is gonna tell my estimators that I want them to sync up with this version of my proposal. If I come back into BOE Pro, I can now reach out to that, which was a version 31 in this environment. I can reach out and sync up with that version. So I'll sync with CE proposal. I'll scroll down. Actually, it's already selected here, my version 31, and I wanna pull over any new estimates data. I'll go ahead and select sync here, and it lets me know it updated an estimate. I'll click close, and now I'll just jump back into the BOE view. If I scroll down here, there's two things that are happening simultaneously. The first is it's marking anything with a triangle that needs to be reviewed because it has an updated estimate. And two, when I open it up here, it's kicking us back to the first step of the workflow. So right away, my engineers or my DOE authors or estimators, they can log right back in and do any review that they need to on their base estimate, to get us to, again, that second more updated version. If I come to the sections tab here, another really cool efficient feature here is if I open up rationale and I scroll down to that junior engineer, you'll see it updated my formula for me. I can click to open this formula, and I can go through and adjust this however other way I may want to. But what we're doing here is figuring out based on your base expression, what do we need to increase this by or decrease it by to get to the new estimate? In our case, it was a factor of 25% that we increased by. So if BOE Pro plugged that number in for us, I can certainly remove this, and I can increase hours by 25%. I can increase, you know, the pop by 25, whatever I would like to to get to that new estimate of eight hundred hours. Or you can certainly leave this just as it is, and I can push this back through the workflow process. I'll now be tying this new updated formula to that estimate of 800 that came over. So it's really important when you have these changes, especially if there are wide changes across the whole proposal to be able to easily identify where that doesn't match up with the estimate and then have some idea on how we need to modify that formula to get us to that new eight hundred hours. Eventually, this would just kick back through the workflow process again. It will give me a new updated version that I'd be able to submit over to my pricers again. Now all my text matches, the estimates that were entered by by the pricers. In a nutshell, from standardizing data to meet government requirements to streamlining synchronization between pricing and estimation, a strong, well designed workflow gives us back valuable time so we can focus on what matters the most. Thank you for being with me today. At this time, we're going to conduct a quick audience poll and then open the floor to questions. If you haven't already submitted a question, please enter it in the Q and A tab now. Okay. Great. This is good stuff, Daniel. Thank you. Before we hop into questions for today, we're gonna just pause and do a brief audience poll. So at this time, if everyone could just, answer a quick question here. Would you like to be contacted by a sales representative to learn more about ProPricer, the industry standard proposal pricing solution for government contractors? And we'll just give it a second here to allow everybody to answer. A lot of really good stuff happening. Just give it one more second here. Alright. Okay. I think at this time, Dana, you can dive right into q and a. Perfect. Thank you, Lisa. Yeah. So I have a few questions here that came in, during the demonstration here. I'm just gonna go through these one by one. If there's additional questions, please feel free to enter them in, and we'll, we'll run through as many as we can. First question here. Is there an efficient way to alter a proposal's period of performance to pull or push all BOEs at once? There is. There's what if scenarios where you can shift, you know, the task period of performance, the WBS or the CLIN, depending on how the proposal is set up. And and all the BOEs that are tied to them will shift as well. I have a question here about if you use salary survey data to support your direct rate, is it okay to use something in a range without explaining specifically why you chose that rate? An example of the fiftieth, percentile ERI is $50 and the seventy fifth is 60. Is it safe to choose $52.12 without further explanation? So I can't give an answer on whether or not it's safe. What I can say is, we do have workflow processes that can be set up with default text and BOE sections, for instance, where we would either force users to explain why they chose a rate, or we can go without having users choose why they selected a specific rate. So we can't give a solid answer on whether or not it's safe. But we can set things up where there's a required explanation or, no no explanation required. Next question here. Does Deltek have automated tools A. I. For task estimating and resource loading? So the A. I. Tools currently, and this has been a big talk over here. We've been diving pretty deep into A. I. A lot of the A. I. Tools are more focused on the current data that we have in the system, verifying it's valid data. We have other tools that'll reach out to other systems and import data. And I know there's some customers who use third party A. I. Products to gather data, sift through the data and import into ProPricer via templates. So nothing currently, native in the system, that's going to pull estimating data in for instance or resource loading. But we are moving in that direction specifically in BOE Pro. Being able to call out in those statements, I need X amount of hours for a specific labor category over this period of performance, and you know, I want to front load or back load these hours. There was another question here I had seen about integration. If you have actuals in another system for maybe a previous project and you wanted to reuse whatever those spreads were, we do have the ability through an external system integration to reach out and pull those loads in. So there are automated tools, A. I. Specifically. Not there quite yet. Which actually leads into this next question. There's a question about a Propricer user, who's been using both Propricer and Costpoint for a long time. They're curious to hear if there's going to be an interface and when it's available to import Propricer directly into Costpoint. So we do currently have a tool called Integration Pro that does just that. I will add it's it's really customer specific on what data it is that you want to import, into Costpoint specifically, because we have to work with both the Propricer database and the Costpoint database and make sure we have read and write access on both sides. To add to that, any other system that you're working in, typically if it's SQL, Oracle, we do have a linkage to import into Propricer. As far as pushing from Propricer to another system, the tool is there. We just have to drill down to the data that you would want to push, set up a template, and we can get that up and running for you. Next question here. Any top tier defense contractor currently using the application? So it is it's BOE Pro is a, it's a COTS product. There are some changes you can make to it, not to the source code or anything, but every customer and we do have some top government contractors. If you guys wanted a list of the specific contractors, I can get that from one of my AEs. The last slide here has my email. Feel free to shoot me an email and I can send that list over to you. But it is a, it's a COTS product. However, there are some modifications we make and we do that for every single customer that purchases. These aren't necessarily UI changes, but different templates, what we're pulling from the algorithm and contractor edition. We modify it for each customer to a certain point, to make sure we can handle your workflow process. Another question here. Is it possible to capture, rejection comments on a BOE for audit and clarification purposes? It is any user who has access to reject back to the previous step of a workflow, will have the ability to leave a comment. So it'll both send it in an email to the user of the previous step and it'll mark it down in the workflow log. Somebody can go in, review that workflow log, see who rejected something, when it was rejected, and for what reasons it's rejected. And we're working on some other tools that, will be coming out pretty soon, where you will be able to pull some metrics on, you know, how long BOEs are taking to be written, what's the percentage of rejection for what users. So you'll be able to dive a little bit deeper into into those metrics. Question here about configuring workflows. Can we configure different workflows for each proposal or proposal template? Yes, absolutely. Workflows are specific to every individual proposal that you create. You can have templates that are already set up with a basic workflow every time you generate a proposal. If you need to add an additional step and addition, you know, maybe there's a peer review that needs to happen, You can easily drop that in in the proposal properties, and assign users to that specific step. Another question about, external systems here. Can my workflow users insert data from external systems into their BOE such as actuals? Yes. BOE Pro comes with an external system integration built in. We would sync that up with whatever system you want to pull data from. What's nice about it is you create the form that the user fills out to pull data. So they may search for a specific project, a specific W. B. S, call out some resources and then insert that data. However you decide to format it, let's say the proposal manager who set that up, right into their BOE. And it'll be able to extract through the AI generate formulas feature. Any formulas that came over any hours that came over and assign those as estimates. Another important question here. Can estimators leverage data from existing BOEs when creating new BOEs within a proposal? Yes. So something that wasn't touched on here is we saw how there was a formula generated there. It gave me some resulting hours, those six forty hours, and I assigned those as an estimate to the proposal. But if another user is in the system and they need to base an estimate off of my six forty hours, they are able to call out another user's formula to use that as a base in their formula, and say maybe they need 50% of those hours for a senior or a junior engineer, some other labor category. Yes, we can draw those linkages. So if that 06:40 gets updated, it'll actually update any other formulas that are using those base hours. It will trigger a review, so nothing's changing without getting an approval. But yes, you can draw those linkages. And then a question on, is there a limit to workflow steps in BOE Pro? There is not. You can have I've worked with customers who have two steps. I've worked with others who have, like, nine or 10 different steps just depending on how you you want your process to flow, but no limit on the amount of steps that you would need. Had a couple other questions come in here. Let me scroll back up here. So, as far as ERIs data is concerned, are those rates preloaded? So they're they would be preloaded, into contractor edition. This doesn't mean the system comes with them preloaded in that sense. However, if you have, like an Excel export from ERI, all the labor categories, years of experience, those sorts of things, we can pull that excel file into Propricer. So when users say in BOE Pro or assigning hours, they'll be able to select the dropdowns of what percentile, what location, and it'll be able to pull the appropriate rate. So we do load them in as users or an administrator who can do so and then we give access to the users to to use that data. Another question here, does Integration Pro interact with BOE Pro or just contractor edition? So integration pro just syncs up with contractor edition and some other external system. However, because BOE Pro is synced up with contractor edition, anything you're pulling into contractor edition, we can very easily import into BOE Pro as well. So the direct connection is contractor edition to another system. But then we have that direct connect between BOE Pro and CE to share that data as well. Another question here, if you have a if you have BOE Pro and like to create a smaller estimate when a BOE may not be required, can you simply input labor hours, material costs, travel without writing a BOE? Yes. So BOE Pro, does have just a straight estimating feature as well where users can create a task or a WBS element, and and then they can bid some hours against whatever structure is being created there without having to write the BOE. Anyone in the group is familiar with the estimator edition of Propricer. Same idea, just a web based version of that. Go ahead and scroll through these here a little bit. So how does BOE Pro archive the base of estimate to make them easily searchable as a starting point for a similar opportunity? So we save these to a library. This is the way it's currently set up. If you save one of those BOEs to a library, and you want to essentially search that library for a bid that's similar to what you're currently working on, the current process is I would create a BOE. I would say I want to pull something from a library and then through the descriptions or any other relevant text that's saved in that BOE, I'll be able to search. These this is text that was entered by somebody when they saved the BOE. So I may save it and say it was this project. Maybe I want to hold on to what the WBS and CLIN was. I can then search those different variables and it'll pull up a list of anything that matches what I'm typing. That's the current setup and a couple releases now. Again, pushing the AI thing. We'll get to a point where users are simply typing something out or copy and pasting data into as what I had a rationale section and it'll be able to see if what you're writing matches something that's already saved in the BOE library. You can also export these. So I just showed everything kind of on the screen here. There are some reports that you can export to Word or PDF and you can kind of search through those as well. It's more of a manual cumbersome process, but there are ways if you had like a shared drive that you wanted to save all the BOEs to, that's possible as well. Alright. How does your BOE tool evaluate the formula expression and check it against the contractor edition, to know that things are out of sync? Is it AI or do you manually make it an expression or the BOE tool automatically detects and check it against CE? So the way that it's able to tell is when we take a and I guess it's important to talk about the flow of data here when I'm in BOE Pro, I'm pushing a proposal, whether it's complete or partially complete. However, we decide to do this in the workflow process over to contractor edition. When it comes in, there's values set against each of the resources, whatever those hours or costs are for them. And it shows a little green flag that I that I had pulled on the screen there that this is all synced up. If somebody goes in and changes an estimate, that back end value changes and now we know that estimate doesn't match up with what was written in the BOE text. All that checking is done in contractor edition. For instance, if I submit a proposal and then I go back into BOE Pro and I'm making updates to that submitted version, Contractor Edition is not going to know. I'd have to push a new version over, to make sure that both CE and BOE Pro are on the same version. So the version checking is happening on the contractor edition side to see if we're out of sync. The BOE Pro proposal is typically locked in BOE Pro, so no one can make any adjustments. And then a user with permissions would sync up. As soon as I pull those new estimates into boe pro, it'll show those little yellow flags where something doesn't match the previous version. There's another feature that I didn't go into detail in in the demonstration here, but there is the ability to check previous versions as well. So as an estimator, if I log in and see, you know, there's a yellow triangle here. I need to update my formulas. There's a dropdown where I can put the new estimate directly against the old estimate and see what I had originally entered. So it is doing some tracking there as well. Both systems get flagged, but it all starts in contractor edition verifying that things are in sync. Okay. That's a. lot of great questions. scrolling through these. Yeah. A lot of questions. I think I got to everything here. Of course, if there's other questions, my email's on the screen here. More than happy to have anyone reach out and be happy to talk with you further. Alright. Perfect. Thanks, Daniel. Okay. Before we officially conclude, we want to remind you, you'll receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And if we were not able to get to your question today, we'll be sure to follow-up with you directly offline. And with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Please visit deltek.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Have a great rest of your day.