Name: ProPricer for Subcontractors: Creating Proposals Ready for Prime Time
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T16:31:05.306Z
Duration: 34 min 16 s
Description: ProPricer for Subcontractors: Creating Proposals Ready for Prime Time

Transcript for "ProPricer for Subcontractors: Creating Proposals Ready for Prime Time": Hello everyone. I'm Thomas Puntman, a solutions engineer here at Deltek, and thank you for joining us for today's presentation. Before I get started, I have a few administrative items to go over. Firstly, for the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type it into the q and a box at any time, and we will address as many questions as we can at the end of this webinar. Any questions that are 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 let's get started. Today's presentation, ProPricer for subcontractors, creating proposals ready for prime time, will cover how subcontractors can leverage ProPricer to create submission ready proposals to both prime contractors and government agencies. What we'll cover today is ProPicer Contractor Edition, and within the software, we'll go over the centralized repository, version control, labor and material pricing, importing and exporting data into and out of the software, the reporting within the software, and our what if analysis. With that, let's go ahead and let's open the software. First, I'm going to give you a brief rundown of the user interface. At the top of the screen is going to be our ribbon. This is where most of the functions and features are going to be stored that you can use across your proposals. I'm not gonna go over all of them, but I will point out the setup ribbon. This is where you can create user logins to be able to access the software. If you want multiple teams or divisions to work inside of the ProPricer, you can also create role based permissions to grant and deny access to certain parts of the software. You can do this on the individual or group level. On the left side is going to be our navigation pane. This is where all the data inside of ProPricer will be stored. And this works as a central repository, meaning anytime you create data inside of here, you can use it across all proposals and by any user that has access to that data. In our navigation pane, you can also create folder structures. I recommend for your proposals, you can create one for the year and then create a folder for each customer. And within that customer, you can create folders to track the progress of your proposals that you're submitting. On the right side is going to be our workspace where anything inside of ProPricer will open. It will open up in a new tab, and then you can split across these tabs or you can bring it to another screen if you wanted to. The proposal that I'm going over today is going to be demo data. So any columns that you see or any labor category names that you might see, these are all adjustable and customizable to your company's structure. Before we jump into the proposal, I'm going to go over the foundations of a proposal inside of ProPricer. And the first part of that is going to be the algorithm. The algorithm is what drives the pricing inside of all proposals. On the left side is gonna be your elements, and that's going to be where you define the actual cost. So you'll see I'll have a fringe, overhead, g and a, all the way to my total price. And then on the right side is gonna be my formula where I'll tell ProPricer how to calculate those costs. We can encompass any pricing scenario that your company might have. So if you have a different pricing depending on the worksite or on the organization, you can switch that, and then we can identify that in the formula and adjust the pricing that way. You may see that I have a fringe overhead in GNA in my elements, but you don't see the rates attached to it. That's going to be inside of your indirect rate table. If I switch over to my indirect rate table, you're gonna see it broken up into two sections. On the top is going to be your indirect pools. These are gonna be those buckets that house the different sets of rates that you might have. In this example, you'll see I have one depending on the category. So for my administration, I have this set of rates here at the bottom. And if I switched over to engineering, you'll see they have a different set of rates applied to them. If you wanted to, you can create one master pool that has all of your different rates as well. Next is gonna be our directory table. And this is where there's gonna actually define the cost of your labor categories or non labor category resources. You'll see there's a lot of informational columns here. One I'll point out is our default rate. If you wanted to apply a rate to a labor category or non labor category resource without applying an escalation to it, you would do that in your default rate column. But if you wanted to apply a yearly escalation to that resource, you can use our escalation site here to apply that and ProPricer will automatically calculate it for you. So you'll see I have a base date of January 2025, a base rate of $20.35, and a yearly escalation of four percent. That's going to be applied here in my rate section. And every year in January, you're going to see that yearly escalation. Next, I'm going to talk about our material module. The material module is where all your different parts and assemblies can be stored. It's broken up into two main libraries. At the top is gonna be your common library, which will be a massive data dump of all your different parts and assemblies. And the product library can be specific to a specific product that you might create multiple times, and it will have its own parts, assemblies, and vendors as well. I'm going to go over the common library for now. So I'll open that up. And what you're going to see is on the top here are gonna be all my different parts with all the different informational fields that I have in these columns, which can be adjustable. And at the bottom, it's gonna be broken up into a couple of sections here. First is gonna be associated costs. So if you have any touch labor or any costs associated with this specific part, you'll be able to assign that here with the hours, units, or cost. And then you can also do learning curves on parts and assemblies or any complexity factors that you may have. You can assign that here as well. Next, you're able to attach quotes, POs, and miscellaneous data like historicals to every part and assembly. I'm gonna show you how the quote looks. They all are very similar. You'll see at the top, I'm gonna have my quote here with all the information of fields that it needs. You can able you're able to put the lead time, the minimum buy quantity. And then at the bottom section, you're going to see I can define a quantity, pricing. So you'll see from 1 to 26, I'm gonna do 57¢. 26 to a 100 is gonna be 43. And then if you have any time phase costing as well, you're able to apply that to that specific part and any associated costs that it might have as well. Next, I'll go into the assemblies. The assemblies is gonna be very familiar to the parts. The only difference is that base unit cost here is gonna be green because it's automatically automatically calculating the cost of all your different elements. Here, you're going to see all the similar tabs as the parts, but an extra one for your elements where you'll actually assign the different parts and assemblies that roll up into the assembly that you have selected. It works as an indented BOM, so you'll see I can open these up and they'll have that indention for you already. With all the different parts and assemblies that you might have, we also have consolidation rule sets that you can define yourselves. So you'll see my consolidation rule for my first one is gonna be grab any quote PO or miscellaneous historicals that I might have. The second rule set that I created is first, I want you to grab POs, then I want you to grab a quote, and then if I don't have any of those, then grab my historicals. You can create custom fields in here and make it grab by whatever scenario or situation that you might want it to do. These are all custom created. With that, we're gonna go ahead and go into the proposal. So before I jump in here, I wanna talk about importing data into ProPricer. Right? There's a couple of different ways you can import data. First, you can copy and paste straight from Excel. As long as these different columns match, you can just paste it straight into the software. We also have a built in tool called the ProPricer import export tool, which what it will basically do is create an Excel template for you, and you can give that off to other users or other people like finance, and they fill out the different columns. They give you back that template, and then you can automatically bring that mass amount of data into the software. So you don't need everyone to have access to the software. You can create different Excel templates based off of the data that you want them to fill out. They fill in the respective columns, give it back to you, and then you can import that data with a click of a button. Another way is called Integration Pro. It's a companion product that allows you to tie an ERP database or any database that you might have into the ProPricer database automatically and run the import or export of data automatically in the background. That is the different ways you can import data. If there's any questions, you can type it in the Q and A. But I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna open up our task view. This is where you actually will define your efforts within the proposal. So what you're gonna see is three sections. At the top is gonna be my task. This is where I'll actually define the different efforts. You'll see I have a task ID, which is my unique identifier. But if your company uses CLIN or WBS, that could be the main column as well. You'll see I have those here. If I didn't need a cleaner WBS, you can drag them off and then they would disappear and you would never have to use it again. But we're just gonna look at my first task here, which is my test system design. To input resources into here, I'm gonna use the resource input here in the middle. First, I have a design engineer one, a couple of different columns that I filled out, and you'll see I'm spreading hours across that period of performance. You can spread hours annually, by phase, quarterly, or monthly, whichever way that you need. And then as well, if you use full time equivalents, we have something called equivalent heads that you can go ahead and use instead of hours and ProPricer will automatically calculate that for you. You're able to set the amount of hours that a equivalent head would have in a single month, either on a calendar. So you can do a month, every month of the year for multiple years, or you can do a base hours for the whole proposal as well. I'm gonna go ahead and input a new resource in here just so that you can see an example of it working. So I'm going to just select the Machinist two, and then I'm gonna spread these I'm gonna spread two thousand hours evenly across my period of performance. What I can do is go to my spread amount, say, hey. I want two thousand hours across this period of performance, and then I'm gonna use our curve option to evenly spread this across that period of performance. If I wanted to load 2,000 every month, I could select load or any curves that you may wanna use here, 50 in the front, 50 in the back, you can select that. ProPricer will automatically calculate that for you. But I'm just gonna evenly spread this across, save, and then you'll see ProPricer will automatically distribute those hours for me. On the bottom section is gonna be our resource summary. And this is just gonna give a full breakdown of every resource you have for this task, and it's gonna give you that breakdown in cost all the way to the total price. With all of our tasks, you can also use detailed travel if that is something that you may do. You're able to select a destination, how many people and how many days. ProPricing will pull from your table with your airfare rates or your per diems and will automatically calculate the cost of that trip for you. This is stored in a table, so you can store as many destinations as you do and the per diem rates and your airfare rates that you may have as your standard. You can save that in the table and use it across all your proposals. If there's any SOWs that you wanted to put inside of the effort, we have a tab that you can input that in. And then as well for BOEs, you're able to input a standard BOE. You can save them as templates, and you can go ahead and select the template and bring it over automatically for that specific task. Next, we can go ahead and go into our bill of materials task and view our materials section for your different efforts. Here, you can grab any assembly or part that you may need for that specific effort, and you're gonna spread across that material with the material distribution section in the middle across that period of performance for you. Now I'm gonna go ahead and go into my reporting. We have over a 100 baiting reports inside of the software that you can use to report upon any data inside of your proposals. If there's a specific report that isn't given the correct output or you need a different output that we may not have, you can also create custom reports, save that, and then use it across all users in the system. You can also create batch reports if you wanted to combine two, three, or four reports. You can create the batch, assign the reports, and then print it out all at once. The first report I'm going to show you is our detailed cost breakdown. It's the basic one that will just give you a full breakdown of your costs for that whole proposal. So what you're going to see is at the top, it's separating by my task. Then it's gonna print all of my different resources each year for that specific task. And then at the bottom, it's gonna give me the cost of all my indirect rates, all my indirect costs here to the total price. Now we have report options that will allow us to manipulate this report with a couple clicks of a button. First, if you didn't want to categorize this by task and by instead you wanna do it by CLIN, you can switch this to CLIN and then you can also add a WBS. If you wanna do CLIN by WBS, print this to your screen and then ProPricer will automatically categorize those resources into the respective CLIN and WBS and assign those resources to it. I'm gonna go ahead and change this back to task so we can see the difference. And as well, if you wanted to not print this out by year, you can print this out quarterly, monthly, or by phase, or none, or a summary. As well, if your fiscal year period is January through December, but whoever you're submitting to may have a different fiscal year period, you can come in here and switch this to let's say October through September. Print this out and it's gonna reflect that in the report. The last thing I'll show you in our report options for now is gonna be our disclosure format. So currently, we have all of our different indirect rates and costs printed out. What you can do is use the disclosure format to say, hey, I wanna burden through all these fees. Print this to the screen. And now whenever this loads, you're going to see all the indirect rates that were at the bottom. It's actually gonna be rolled up into my resources here and their rates and cost. And you can switch that as easily with a couple of clicks of a button if you wanna just only burden the G and A, and it will show those costs that are not burden. If you didn't wanna show the hours and units or the different resource rates, you can disable it here with a button and then print that to screen. And what that's gonna do is not show the hours and units and the rates and just show you that yearly cost breakdown. The next report I'll show you is our bill of materials. This is a easy report that you can go ahead and print out all your different materials and maybe associated costs if you wanted to. You print this out and it's going to go ahead and give you that full breakdown of all your different materials, the assemblies, parts attached to associated costs. If you wanted to, you can customize the columns that are printing out. You can also say, I only wanna show my assemblies. You can consolidate the assemblies list, print this to the screen, and it's only going to show you those assemblies that are inside of the proposal here. With every single one of our reports, we're able to print them out to PDF, to Word, or to Excel, printer if you need to. With our print to Excel, we have a unique feature called export full pricing. What this does is it allows you to print this out and give you a formula rich workbook. So if I went ahead and print this out, I'll go ahead and drag out the output. I have it on the side here. What you're going to see is that report inside of ProPricer is now in Excel and it is formula rich, right? Any cell that I click in here is gonna have a formula tied to it. What it's also gonna bring over is all of the different pricings that you use to build up that proposal into the different tabs. So at the bottom here, you'll see I have my different tabs here that build up this proposal. For example, this direct rates tab, I can change the rate for my on-site call center representative, and it's gonna reflect in the actual report and change the costing. So you'll see I keep switching this over and it's bringing all the different costs that I use to build out this proposal. And it'll eventually get me to my P sheet. My P sheet is my pricing sheet. It's gonna give me a fully, breakdown monthly. So what you're gonna see here is my design engineer one, and it's going to be broken down every single month to the total price. And again, this is formula rich. If I changed anything of one of those tabs, it would update here. That is our reporting. The next thing I will go ahead and show you is our what ifs. We have multiple different what if analysis that you can run to kind of be more competitive in your pricing. The first example that I'm going to show you is our flex shift. Our flex shift scenario is let's say that government or your customer comes back to you and says you need to push this proposal out one year. Instead of having to go into the proposal and change all your different calculations and all of the different dates, what you can do is copy your proposal with this button, change the version number to a different version, and then come in here to your start and end date and change it by a offset of twelve months. If you only wanted to affect specific task or resources, you can also do those selections here. I'm just gonna go ahead and process this. It went ahead and moved my whole proposal one year over. And so that you can see it and not just believe my words, I'm gonna go ahead and run a comparison report. And what you're gonna see is I will have my version zero. I'm gonna compare it to my version one, print this to the screen, and I'm gonna have a 4% increase in costs in my delta here because all my labor resources are getting that 4% yearly escalation applied to them automatically. The next what if I'll go ahead and I'll show you is our target pricing. First, I wanna create a copy of my proposal so I can compare the different costs. And the scenario for this one is you wanna be more competitive with your total price. So you'll see I have a current price of $27,000,000. And to be more competitive, I'm gonna get down to 25,000,000. What I can do is change this number to 25,000,000. And it's gonna affect every single category that I do not have frozen here to get me to that target price. So you'll see my labor, other, and a little bit of material costs went ahead and got changed by factor to give me as close as possible to 25,000,000. I'm gonna go ahead and click process here. And what you're gonna see is it gonna give me as close as possible to 25,000,000 depending on how many decimal places you have in your proposal. It will try to get you as close as possible. If I really needed to hit this on the mark, I can come in here and change this to 25,000,000, process it again, and it will get me on the dot. I'll go ahead and I will run another comparison report so you can see the difference that it does. What you're going to see is there's a reduction in cost by hours and units to try to get me to that target price. The next scenario I'll go over is resource switching. First, I'm gonna create a copy of my proposal. And the example for this is, let's say I have a design engineer too, and I wanna be more competitive in pricing. So I'm gonna switch his hours to my design engineer one. I think that my design engineer one can pick up the slack. So I'll select my design engineer two. I wanna send it to design engineer one and I wanna apply a 100% of his hours or a factor of one to design engineer one. I'll go ahead and I'll process this. Press okay. And ProPricer automatically brought all those hours to my design engineer one. I run my comparison report to see the difference in costs here. And what you're gonna see just for my first WBS, it moved over all the hours and actually reduced my cost by 1,200,000.0 for this specific WBS. And the last, what if I'll show you today is our target profit fee. The scenario for this one is like target pricing, but the only difference is you're only targeting the fee. First, I'll create that copy. And now you'll see I have a current fee of 2,700,000.0. I wanna be more competitive, and I'm going to go to 2,200,000.0. I'm gonna come in here and put enough zeros. Then it's gonna affect the factor of your different fees depending on the category to get you that to that mark, and then you'll just go ahead and click process. And then pool price is gonna change that fee percentage to get you as close as possible to 2,200,000.0. I won't run a comparison report on that one. I think you believe me by now. The next thing I'll go over, which is the last, is the different types of analysis that you can run with our different views. So you'll see we have multiple different views that you can actually use to report upon your proposals here. One that I will just open for an example is our data view. Here you'll see you have multiple different selections that you can use to change this analysis grid here on the right. You'll see I just have it by WBS and CLIN, and it's gonna give me a full breakdown of the hours, units, costs all the way to that total price. But you can also group this if you wanted to say, hey, I wanna do it by CLIN and by resource type. You'll see all the different types of resources that I'm having applied to my cleanse here. So I have labor in this one and some other costs, give you that full breakdown as well. Another one that we have is our pivot grid. Here you'll see a kind of a similar structure on the left here is my field list where I can select what data that I wanna show on my pivot grid. And then on the right, once I have it selected, it's gonna give me that breakdown. With all of our pivot grids, you can also chart it and you have multiple different charts that you can select from if you wanted to, and you can export this as well. Now I'll go ahead and I'll open it up for our Q and A to see if anyone has any questions. Great, Thomas. Thank you. I just want to take a pause here and ask a brief question for our audience. Would you like to be contacted by a sales representative to learn more about ProPricer, the industry standard proposals pricing solution for government contractors? We'll just give it a couple seconds here to, let everyone answer. Just want to make sure everyone gets a chance to answer a poll here. Okay. Going to move on to our questions here. If you haven't had a chance to, enter your question, please enter it into the Q and A box now, and, we'll get started on answering some of these great questions that are coming in. Yes. Thank you. I I also wanna share that I have Daniel here with me. He's another solutions engineer at Propricer just to kind of help me answer these questions. Let's go ahead and let's get started. The first question we're gonna go over is the government RFP provides standard cost proposal format templates. Does ProPricer provide the ability to easily export data into their templates? Yes. We actually have a companion product called Connect for Office to where you can connect it to the ProPicer database straight in Word or Excel and then upload those different costs or different rates that you may need to plug into that template. The next question is going to be the formula is the formula rich exports new? We've had that for, I wanna say, over at least five years in our nine four and nine nine three versions. A quick one, the document are the documents provided today able to be downloaded? Yes. They should be able to be downloaded on your resources tab on your screen. They will have all the different documents that we have attached for this one. The next question is what if my prime is also using ProPricer? What is the file that I can use so they can load it into their ProPricer? Great question. So we have something called our external data ribbon where you're actually able to export the proposal in a file to upload to a prime or to the government. There's two options. There's called prepare for government where you can, prepare the ZIP file, and, basically you'll set the standard of what cost level you want to show. So if you didn't wanna disclose all your costs, you could disclose only to the total price, to the total cost, and then zip that file up and they can upload it into their ProPricer. Then we also have one called subcontractor exporting where you can export that proposal. And with that one, you can change the cost level. You can change the resource names if you didn't wanna give away your employee codes or labor category resource names. You can also change the WBS and CLIN. Let's see. There's a lot of questions coming in. The next question we'll go over is, I'm new to government contracting. Is the ProPicer an app or only accessible via web browser? It is an app. You will install it on prem in your environment, and it will only be accessible by you and your team. Next question is if our contracts do not involve materials, only labor, can that be removed when doing scenarios? Yes. That's correct. You can remove it. If it's not if you're not using materials in the proposal, it won't show up anyways, but you won't have to use that section. You can only do labor for your scenarios. Next question is what report can I provide to my prime if my prime requires a report that shows formulas? With that, what you'll go ahead and do is you would use that export full pricing. So you would print out the report in ProPricer, all the data points that you want. If you needed to print out multiple reports, you could do a batch report, and then you would just export that to Excel, Use export full pricing. It will create that formula rich workbook for that prime to have, and you can submit that Excel Excel workbook. Next question is, was the position rates based on prevailing wage rates, or did the company have to input their own costs? Right? That's a great question. There's a couple of ways to get those labor rates with those different cost rates. You can input it on your own. What some companies will do is they get it from ERI or salary.com. Any of those wage sites where you can actually get the information, you can get it from there and then just import it into ProPricer. Or if you get it from your finance team or if you have any calculations doing that, you can use our Excel templates to be able to import that as well. Alright. Our next question will be, did you mention that quote and POs can be attached? Can this attachment be included as backup to be submitted to the prime? Yes. Right? So you can attach the quotes and POs to the parts and assemblies. You can also attach Word documents, PDFs within that quote as well. And then when you're submitting that, it will be attached to those parts. We have reports where it will show that attachment of the quote or PO as well. Let me see if we have any more. The next question is if I wanted to use historicals for a future proposal, how could I do that in ProPricer? Right? So after you submit a proposal, you'll still have it inside of the software. What you can do is either go ahead and make a copy of that proposal and track your historicals within it. Or if you have an ERP database that does have historicals within that database, you can go ahead and use Integration Pro to connect to the ERP, bring it into ProPricer, and be able to use those historicals for new proposals as well. Next question we'll go over is can different teams only have access to specific parts of the tool? And that is yes. So with that role based permissions and our access tags, you can kind of grant and deny access to specific parts of the software. If you only wanted your finance team to be able to go into the direct rates and update those rates, you could do that. If you wanted your pricers or your estimators or your engineers to only be able to access the task view to just to be able to input the hours and the resource, you can do that. They don't even have to be able to see the rates as well. Next question we'll go over is, does this have the ability to pull the GSA travel per diem rates? And the answer to that is yes. We have a companion product called the GSA travel tool. And what that will do is pull the actual per diem rates from the GSA travel website straight into your travel table. We'll have a table where it will store all the different destinations, per diem rates, airfare rates, mileage that you may have, and it will pull those ones that it is on the GSA travel website straight into ProPricer for you to be able to use. Last question here is, are you able to connect Costpoint into ProPricer? The answer to that is yes. We actually have a direct integration with our Integration Pro that allows you to connect your cost point database with, into ProPricer. And with that, you can pull all your material BOM data and then as well as your labor rates and your labor costs as well. Alright. I think that's all the questions that we have. We'll go ahead and I. I will pass it to you, Lisa. Thanks. so much, Thomas. Okay, before we officially conclude, we want to remind you that you'll receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And if we are not able to get to your question today, we will be sure to follow-up with you directly offline. And with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Please visit delltech.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Have a great rest of your day.