WHAT WE LOOK AT FIRST
How you already price work.
Where the takeoff actually lives.
The PDF, the spreadsheet, or one person’s head. What is actually in that sheet, who maintains it, and which parts the whole number depends on. That logic is the starting point. We do not throw it away. We ask for the working copy with last year’s waste factors still in it, not the clean one.
How labor units and material get built.
Assemblies, waste factors, and who owns the number. How your people build it — the factors, the units, the shortcuts that are right because of what you know about this trade. We want to see where burden goes on and whether the labor unit on a four-inch weld is still the one you were using two revisions ago.
What the field gets.
A BOM, or a total that implies one. How the set turns into a count today, who checks it, and where the afternoon goes. If the honest answer is a highlighter and a re-key into the RFQ, that is the step Lite is built to take.