Would appreciate some help on the following:

I am new to planning within M&E field and looking at most of the plans the company I have just joined have they are produced in the following way:

Tender is put together based on Quantity based Estimates – i.e. with Software package called ‘Estimation’ which includes labour hours. A ‘Tender programme’ is produced which generally could be just a copy of what the client has in their integrated programme , or it is just a few high-level activities such as ‘first-fix’ and ‘second fix’ etc.
Then, if the contract is won, we have to produce a detailed programme, normally within a month, however, many times the tender negotiations have gone on too long and we must be starting on site in 2 weeks!
This detailed programme is made up on the basis of units of days not hours and the planners then resource and cost load it. The way they do this is to take the tender breakdown and try to roughly split between the different activities, which enables a budget to be set for each of the activities. The main aim of this is for Earned Value analysis. In terms of Resource loading for example, a resource is entered as ‘ELEC’ for Electrician. There are no costs entered in the Resource cost fields as the labour hours are included within the budget costs.

Sometimes, the planners will enter a unit per day into the Resources in order to produce a histogram presumably for resource levelling somehow.

When some of the estimates from the Tender do not fit to activities, such as Project Management overhead for example, they have a Hammock activity generated and assign it the cost (from the tender)as a budget and let the tasks within the Hammock determine how long it is taking.

I realise that this is probably not the ideal way of doing it but would like some of your views as to what we should be doing and what is feasible to do within a small (ish) planning department. I am particularly interested in your views as to how EAC can be made in these circumstances and how determining labour requirements can be made more effectively.

Thanks in advance,

Andy