Wayne,
Thank you for your feedback, though I feel like this is beginning to take a progressively hostile tone rather than a constructive one. Please remember that I am engaging here because I, as a TBC Product Owner and also as a long-time user and beta tester, value the time you spend here with the goal of improving TBC. I genuinely want to make TBC the best-in-class software and that is always going to be a moving target. What worked 10, 5, or even 2 years ago is sometimes no longer relevant or sufficient and I appreciate that there are users like you who want more out of our software. Again, thank you for taking the time to help us help you.
You are absolutely right that the Takeoff Report has a specific use case. In order to utilize the Takeoff Report to produce the information you seek, you simply need to encompass all areas of the Takeoff Surfaces that you are interested in Site Improvement quantities with Areas Of Interest in such a way that there are no nested Areas Of Interest.
Conversely, when a user chooses to enlcose only a portion of the Takeoff Surfaces with Areas Of Interest and chooses the Include Remaining Areas option, they are telling TBC that they don't really care about the various Site Improvement itemizations within the remaining area since there is no Area Of Interest defined and just want the remaining surface to surface volumes. That is why it just reports the surface to surface volumes and excludes the Site Improvements. Those volumes are accurate based on the input parameters chosen by the user. Like I said, I will do my best to ensure that nuance is more clearly communicated, though there's a pretty thorough warning message that pops up in TBC today explaining that there are potential problems related to AOIs as shown below:
Regardless, you do bring up a valid point in just removing the option and forcing the user to define Areas Of Interest to include the entirety of the Takeoff Surfaces and the report will return the expected results. That would be pretty limiting to the users who are already using this function as intended, though.
Thanks,
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Charlie Sorg
TBC Product Owner, CIS
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-21-2022 07:51
From: Wayne Welshans
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
Charlie, The takeoff report is used specifically to quantify the takeoff materials (ie. earthwork AND site improvement materials). If the user doesn't want site improvements then there really is no reason to run the takeoff report as an earthwork report is much much MUCH faster. If you all are going to double down and say that this "nuance" in the command is currently functioning as you actually intended and not fix it then yes there really does need to be a warning note in the command next to the check box for remaining area that says "This does not work and we can't fix it." I know you are not actually going to put that in there so really the only option that makes any sense at all is to remove it from the command until you figure out how to fix it.
There also should be a high priority notice sent out from Trimble to all TBC users warning them of potential errors in their takeoff report quantities. That fact this hasn't happened yet speaks volumes.
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Wayne Welshans
Original Message:
Sent: 04-20-2022 10:34
From: Charlie Sorg
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
Hi everyone, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
The Takeoff Report Engine calculates volumes within each requested boundary (either the 'entire site' or selected AOIs) and then reports the volumes for each Site Improvement (SI) in each Boundary.
Those SI are only reported if they are enclosed by a boundary. If the user selects 'Entire Site' then all SI are enclosed by the outer boundary and are therefore reported.
If the report is selected 'by AOI', we calculate all of the volumes between the surfaces and report on each AOI boundary with its corresponding enclosed SI. Then whatever volumes that were not reported within the AOIs are clumped together and reported as the remaining area ('remainder' is just leftover areas and volumes which were not already reported). Note that the 'remaining area' isn't really a boundary, it is just the volumes which were not reported within an AOI. This means the remainder does not report on SI and material layers outside of the selected AOI.
In the simplest form, when reporting by AOI you are asking that we do a takeoff on 'Entire Site' first (saving the information) and then run the current report 'by AOI'. Then the report could subtract the total of all material volume (in the 'Entire Site') from all of the individual AOI material volumes- this difference is the 'remainder' you want.
I hope that gives some clarity on how to use the functions. Ultimately, if you make sure to use AOIs for the whole site, you should see the results you're after with the exception of AOIs within AOIs, which I have added to the list for future development.
Additionally, I will work on making this nuance more clear to the user to avoid any future misunderstandings of how the features are to be used.
Thanks as always for the open discussion, all of us on the TBC team appreciate and value the feedback we get and always do our best to make TBC better for you!
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Charlie Sorg
Original Message:
Sent: 04-15-2022 07:56
From: Erik Petersen
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
Yeah I was sick to my stomach when I found it out. I luckily found it out on my first couple of sites I did with AOIs, because I did an alternate as AOI and leave the rest of the site with nothing. That's actually how I caught it, comparing the two. One with whole site, one with AOIs and include rest of site. Stuff was matching up at all.
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Erik Petersen
Original Message:
Sent: 04-14-2022 18:06
From: Wayne Welshans
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
Eric, I appreciate your response. Wow. Just wow. I did not remember that post from 3 years ago, thank you for sharing. I see that even Alan himself commented on the posts and must not have been able to make any headway with it (I believe that he would have if he could have).
This is absolutely disgusting. At the risk of sounding over dramatic I must admit that I have never felt ashamed of TBC until today.
These are numbers that carry a very heavy financial liability. I've already said too much.
Cheers,
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Wayne Welshans
Original Message:
Sent: 04-14-2022 13:36
From: Erik Petersen
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
This has been reported and been known for a while. Ever since I figured out what it was doing I've ended up just encompassing the whole site regardless with some sort of AOI
https://community.trimble.com/communities/community-homepage/digestviewer/viewthread?GroupId=397&MID=29475&CommunityKey=d961b046-1661-40f3-8d7e-0bde6866a14d&tab=digestviewer
https://community.trimble.com/communities/community-homepage/digestviewer/viewthread?GroupId=397&MID=29963&CommunityKey=d961b046-1661-40f3-8d7e-0bde6866a14d&tab=digestviewer
I know there's more out there as well
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Erik Petersen
Original Message:
Sent: 04-14-2022 11:14
From: Wayne Welshans
Subject: Major Bug in Takeoff Report
Using TBC v5.62, and quite possibly older versions.
When using the takeoff module to generate a takeoff report, one of the options is to define areas of interest that can be separated out in the report. When running the report command one of the options within the areas of interest is an option to include remaining areas, with that being any areas of the design surface that are not within any of the Areas of Interest. This is great and seems to work just fine with earthwork quantities; but it totally leaves out any site improvement and related material quantities in the remaining area. Even the final totaled quantities at the bottom of the report that supposedly contain all the material and site improvement are short by the amount that fell in the remaining area. This is a huge issue that needs to be resolved ASAP! I can't believe it has gone this long without being caught. Now I am panicking going back through every takeoff I've ever done to see how many are wrong.
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Wayne Welshans
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