Many consultants and monitoring companies are required to estimate costs for a job.  This activity can take a huge amount of time to complete. For larger projects, it can be extremely difficult to accurately estimate costs and manpower requirements.

TAPS has now been enhanced to allow consultants to complete a cost and manpower estimation very quickly.

How It Works

A TAPS estimation database is installed primarily for cost estimation.  Laboratory analysis price lists are imported into the estimation database using Excel.  Likewise, sites and location data is also imported using Excel. Site data will include the grid reference, days of the week the site is open, estimate of time to enter the site and time taken to do the sampling at each location. The resulting files are saved so that if you win the job, the project can be quickly transferred to the TAPS operational database.

The plan is then set up viewed on a calendar view and provisional collections can be modified using drag-and-drop with a mouse.

Manpower Resources

Once you are satisfied with mock plan, you then create a mock schedule for the whole of the project.

A report is printed estimating the daily workload based on the following parameters: starting grid reference of the field worker, average travelling speed, grid reference of the site, time to access the site, time to sample at each location, time to the next site, time to return to the finish of day grid reference.  Global settings include the length of working day and national holidays.

The report can be exported into Excel for further manipulation.

For TAPS Enterprise users, additional functionality includes the ability of defining a factor in distance or time between two sites for out of the ordinary situations.  For example two sites may be only 10 kilometres in a straight line, but traffic conditions may mean it would normally take twice as long to travel between the two points.

Cost of Project

The cost of the project also be printed and calculated.  The system will total the analysis costs and report by location.  You will also see the number of collections required.

From this analysis, you would be able to swiftly and accurately determine both costs and manpower resources for any job, ensuring your profit margin is maintained.