Before quoting a project and/or starting on a new project....
What is included in your ideal scope of work document?
I have been dealing with a customer that provides very little in the way of scope and the projects end up being quite the challenge to keep on course (obviously).
So I'm looking to create a standard SOW document the customer must complete prior to the project and anything that deviates will be ECR.
When faced with this situation, the only way forward is for your quote to include very specific details of what you are going to provide. Sometimes it is just as important to include what you are not going to provide. One small example of this is that when we provide hydraulic power units, oil is not included. In fact, that line is a permanent bullet point in our quote template along with some other standard boilerplate text.
You can, and I have, included the line "anything not explicitly stated in this proposal is not included" which could help you down the road but if you know there are significant parts of the project that must be done but you aren't doing them I would try to point it out. This is especially true when it comes to where your content ends and you have to interface with something else.
One of the biggest potentials for spec-creep is in HMI development. In fact, when someone asks me how long it will take to develop the HMI for a system my answer is, "as long as you want".
While you can't design all the screens before quoting, you can state whether certain things are included and I generally try to limit the number of screens included on the quote. If you are including an alarm system try to take a stab at how many alarms you will include. If you are or are not including a full I/O display on the screens state that. If you are including recipes state how many parameters are in a recipe, what the maximum number of recipes to be stored is and how many of those recipes your programmer will be setting up. My general idea is that by putting certain limits on things I have a better way to come up with pricing what we are proposing. This also can be helpful when the bargaining begins so you can reduce your scope to offer a lower price to the customer. If you don't have any specifics in there, you will reduce your price and the customer will still expect whatever his idea of the system is.
Writing quotes is a learned skill that you will continue to keep refining as long as you continue to write them. Unfortunately, the best teacher is experience so if you don't have that it's good to get with someone that has worked on a lot of similar projects and brainstorm with them. After a while you will have standard phrases and descriptions you feel comfortable with that you can draw upon to make your quoting task more efficient.
One thing I don't usually do is copy and paste from quotes. I have gotten burned a couple of times where some other customer's name is in a quote or I forgot to change things. Luckily I'm fast enough at typing that this isn't too much of a time drain. It also helps me focus on the specific job more and often I think of new things as I'm typing that I wouldn't have thought of if I had just done a cut and paste. I suppose this wouldn't apply if you do a lot of very similar machines. We happen to do a lot of one-off type systems.
