Create Custom Landscaping Designs and Quotations Quickly and Easily

Generate a Detailed Quotation by Drawing a Landscape Design

If you are in the business of designing and implementing consumer or commercial landscaping, you know how important it is to provide a professional proposal.  Your customer wants to see how their property will look if they implement your plan, and they need to understand the various components of labor and materials that make up your price quotation.  Quality landscaping can be an expensive investment, and your credibility as a professional provider is essential to giving your customer the confidence they need to choose you for this important task.

You also know that creating a professional proposal can be a time consuming and labor intensive undertaking.  Yet speedy turnaround of the proposal after meeting with the prospective customer is also essential to your success.  Chances are, multiple companies have been asked to provide quotations, and quick turnaround can make the difference between success or failure.

A professional landscaping proposal contains:

• Plans showing the layout of the proposed design, and how the design fits with existing landscaping and structures
• Detailed reports of the services and items that will be provided, and
• Clear explanations of your pricing.

The Landscaping Knowledge Pack, combined with Quotation Apprentice for Visio, can generate this proposal for you - as quickly as you can create the drawing of the landscape design.  It utilizes your database, your items and your pricing.  It assigns installation labor based on your rules, and it recommends related items based on your preferences.  And all this customization is available to you, with only a few hours of data input for the initial application setup - no programming required.

Easy Drawing Creation

Quotation Apprentice for Visio uses Microsoft's Visio drawing platform for its user interface.  Key landscaping components are represented as shapes on Visio stencils, and can be dragged and dropped on a scale drawing of the landscape design.  When the shape is first dropped on the drawing page, a dialog box appears -- letting you select a specific item from your database and size it if appropriate -- and suggests related items.  Labor and pricing calculations based on sizes and quantities are calculated automatically.  Shapes can be moved and resized to fit the drawing, using standard Visio tools, and the model of the design changes accordingly, including quantity and pricing changes.  In the background, a set of professional reports are constantly updating with the current item list and pricing.  When the proposal is complete, it can be printed or exported to a variety of other applications.

Your Data, Your Rules

Apprentice Systems has harnessed its powerful Intelligent System development platform and focused it on solving a specific problem - landscaping design and quotation.  Because of this focus, we've been able to simplify the effort required to build a custom application.  Essentially, by modifying and customizing the initial database provided in the Landscaping Knowledge Pack, you are able to control these elements of your design and quotation system:

• The items available for inclusion, their unit pricing, their installation times and their dimensions (such as mature spread of plants and trees)
• The method used for calculating pricing, either based on quantities or calculations based on area (e.g. lawns, beds, patios) or lengths (e.g. hedges)
• Which items and services to offer as related items (e.g. mulching as a related item for beds, pruning as a related item for trees)

With the Landscaping Knowledge Pack and Quotation Apprentice, you can calculate and aggregate pricing for an entire project and generate a proposal as quickly as you can layout the design.  Because of the automation provided, you can generate proposals quickly and economically, enabling you to do more proposals and therefore close more sales.  The professionalism of the proposals can also increase your closing rate, boosting sales even further.