Knowledge Bases Management

The overall quality of the economic estimate (both costs and revenues) is affected by the reliability of the estimate of the Quantity and of the Unit Values related to the "estimate items" used.

The Knowledge Base Management module is aimed at managing an unlimited number of databases containing "items" that can be used in many modules of Bridge system (Cost Estimating, Contracts, Subcontracts, Internal Services).

The defining, the structuring, the feeding and the maintain of the Data Base is one of the prerequisites for economic estimates of higher quality.

The items contained in the Data Base could be:

• created and maintained into the Bridge system;
• acquired from external databases (“commercial”).

A peculiarity of the Knowledge Base Management module is its ability to manage:

• Elementary items;
• Composed items.

Elementary items may belong to any category (Human Resources, raw materials, semi-finished materials, finished products, equipment and means of production, etc.);

Composed items are made of sets of elementary items and/or composed items existing in the data base.

The update of the values associated to an elementary item propagates in all the composed items which are containing it.

Features

The main features of the module allow:

• to create new archives;
• to create, within each archive, new elementary and composed items;
• to import new items from outside through procedures of data acquisition and field mapping;
• to manage the economic value of each item with different methodologies, depending on its type (fixed unit cost, unit cost distributed over the time, standard cost);
• to manage the availability of the items over time (period by period);
• to compare the periodic availability of the items with the related requirements arising from the Projects in place;
• to perform global updating of items into the archives;
• to carry out automatic search of used items;
• to display data related to items contained in the archives;