Phone: 250-714-6681
E-mail: Info @rone.ca

The authors of SP Estimating - Rob & Jeanne Schippers - have worked in the construction industry for a combined total of over 45 years. They have worked mostly together, in almost every conceivable capacity from drafting & design, owning and operating a general contracting company, working on site doing trade-work, operating equipment, survey and layout, and supervision of major projects, through estimating and project management.
 

Projects include subdivisions, single and multi-unit housing developments, high-rise buildings, schools, hospitals, a conference centre, parkades, bridges, and treatment plants. They were located mostly in British Columbia, but also in Alberta, and also worked for 3 years in Phoenix, Arizona. Both have a Gold Seal certification in Project Management, and have extensive formal education in everything from Building Technology, Estimating, Quantity Surveying, Mediation, Drafting, Business Management, and numerous other courses.

Computers and Applications:

We were among the very first to start using personal computers in our work on job-sites and in the office, starting in 1985 with an early PC, running DOS, PC Write, and Lotus 123 from a single 5-1/4 floppy disk. We wrote the contract documents in PC-Write which were used on various projects. We used CAD to assist us in project layout on a high-rise building in 1989, and did most of the CAD drafting for two projects in Arizona in 96-99. 

We developed a job-costing system in 1989 using the PC-File database program, which enabled us to have up to the minute job cost figures for a $15 million project we were managing. This same system was later adapted to Alpha5 and Paradox and used on the Arizona projects. 

Starting in 94, we designed and built Internet web-sites for several companies and organizations, and currently update and maintain a few sites on a regular basis.

We also developed a contacts database in Access which links thousands of suppliers and trades with hundreds of projects, and a mail-merge application in Microsoft Word which fills in the BCCA 200 subcontract documents for a project. Our subcontract payable program, which runs in Quattro Pro version 8.0, is used by a major General contractor whose volume is in the range of $40 million a year, to record all its subcontract accounts. (Porting this to Excel is planned soon)

Estimating Program History:

Our first construction project tender using a computer spreadsheet estimate built on the VP Planner Plus program was submitted in 1987. We have been developing this System while using it on an ongoing basis on hundreds of estimates for our own business and for other Contractors. We started providing copies of the System to a major general contractor in 1994, and they have been using it for all of their estimating ever since. 

To appeal to people in the industry at the time who were not very familiar with computers, the System was designed to look and work like the pencil and paper estimates we were familiar with.

When Paperback Software stopped marketing VP Planner, we re-developed our System using Lotus 123 for DOS, and then later Borland Quattro Pro 1.0 for Windows, which was one of the first spreadsheets to have advanced developer tools built in. The program matured and developed through to Corel Quattro Pro version 8.0. In 2001 we had 10 estimators at 3 different companies using our System on a daily basis. 

The nearly identical Excel 97 version was developed in 1999, when the newer releases of Quattro Pro (2000 and 2002) lacked some of the features the program depended on, and the current SP Estimating Program now runs on any version of Excel from 97 to XP.

Updated December , 2003