Work record / Estimating / Kanopi / Questions answered
Kanopi: questions answered
What people ask me about Kanopi, and my answers. The project itself has its own page.
What made the blind second pass the standing rule on every takeoff?
Our own first pass did. The VP of Operations at a manufacturer sent two plan sets on the same day, unprompted, and asked for wall and roof footage. The blind second pass, a fresh measurement with no view of the first, caught a wall-height model that would have left the shell undersized. What shipped was the corrected set, entered in his own estimating spreadsheet at his own rates. From then on the blind second pass was a standing rule on every takeoff we produce, not something we do to impress a trial customer.
What did declining to license the method to the manufacturer protect?
We said no for now, not for good. The manufacturer wanted to roll the method out across 50 states, and we did not like that model. A method that keeps changing as the models change is worth more to us delivered as a service than sold once for a license fee. So we went on doing the estimating for them as a service.
How does the independent check work on a large plan set?
It works the way it did at the start, and we still run it that way. A person opens the plans and reviews them. Kanopi improves every time, and I expect it to end up better than a human, but the stakes are too high to skip a second look. So a human overlay still goes on top, and it costs about a hundredth of the time.