About Design Units

This section contains information about design units as well as macro units, materials, and custom costs which are managed by Bentley OpenUtilities Designer and Bentley OpenUtilities Workflow Manager. Consult the topics in this section when you want to know more about creating new types of units, updating unit properties, modifying unit components, customizing units, and assigning units to designs either manually or automatically. This section also includes topics on compatible unit rules.

Design units are groupings of parts and assemblies that meet the requirements of a specific construction standard. A compatible unit definition consists of an itemized list of construction components and their associated material and labor costs. Design units are the building blocks of cost estimates, bills of materials, and other reports. Design units are sometimes known as construction units.

A simple example of a compatible unit is a crossarm assembly, which would consist of the crossarm as well as braces, insulators, steel insulator pins, ties, and various nuts, bolts, lag screws, and washers. Different crossarm design units reflect various construction options. For instance, a unit designated as CX 30-01-S might refer to a single-arm crossarm whereas CX 303-01-D might refer to a double-arm crossarm. The way a crossarm unit is defined would determine whether the crossarm is wooden, fiberglass, or galvanized steel, whether the braces are alley-arm or V-shaped, possibly even whether the steel insulator pins have nylon threads or lead threads.

Each company has its own set of unit definitions and accounting codes. Compatible unit data is normally loaded into Bentley OpenUtilities Designer during configuration. If your company maintains unit data in an external system, updates to the unit data in Bentley OpenUtilities Designer can be reloaded periodically with the appropriate system configurations.

In addition to standard units, Bentley OpenUtilities Designer supports private units. You can create a private unit either by building it from scratch or by copying a public unit and modifying it. Private units can be promoted to public units by a system administrator or other users who have been assigned this capability. With externally maintained unit data, the system will require a process for managing public and private units created or modified by Bentley OpenUtilities Designer users. This process will depend on the way your system has been configured.

With Bentley OpenUtilities Designer, you can manually assign specific units to the work locations of a design using the Units Catalog, or you can assign units automatically. With automatic unit assignment, Bentley OpenUtilities Designer assigns a default unit to a work location when you assign the facility that has been linked with the unit.

An obsolete unit can be flagged with a marker to indicate that it has been retired. Obsolete units remain in the database, but they cannot be used for new construction.

Categories of Units

In Bentley OpenUtilities Designer, units are classified as follows:

Compatible Units
Macro Units
Materials
Custom Costs

Design units and macro units share the same set of properties whereas materials and custom costs have their own properties. Each category of units is represented by a separate folder in the Folder List.

Compatible Unit	A compatible unit is a set of data reflecting a standardized specification of labor and materials. A compatible unit is usually the smallest meaningful subassembly that can be employed by itself as part of a larger task. Bentley OpenUtilities Designer will let you build design units with macro units, other design units, and materials.
Macro Unit	A macro unit is normally a group of design units, often constituting a design standard or engineering specification. Macro units are often defined for repetitive installations, removals, and transfers consisting of standard combinations of design units. You can build macro units with other macro units, design units, and materials.
Materials	A material item is a single component used in conjunction with a construction or maintenance task. A material item is usually applicable to a wide variety of situations.
Custom Costs	A custom cost is a unit that represents a miscellaneous charge incurred by a construction project. Typically these units represent such costs as federal and state permit fees, expenses related to special equipment or services (ditch-digging, traffic control, barricading), and other costs. Custom costs must be manually assigned to a design and are not valid components of macro units and design units. Since custom costs are primarily labor-only units, they are not reflected in the bill of materials for the job.

Ownership of Units

Bentley OpenUtilities Designer treats units as either public or private on the basis of ownership.

Public Units Public units are shared by all users of the system. These units are loaded into the database as libraries of macro units, design units, materials, and custom costs. Only a user with administrative privileges can create, modify, or delete a public unit. Any user can copy a public unit to create a private unit.

Private Units A private unit is a custom unit that you create for your own use. Private units are available only to their owners and to users with administrative privileges. To create a private unit, you can either copy and then modify an existing public unit or create a new one from scratch. If you create a private unit that other users would like to incorporate into their designs, the private unit can be promoted to a public unit by a user with administrative privileges.

Linear Units

A linear unit derives its Quantity value from the length of the work spans and span features to which it is assigned. The Quantity default value of a non-linear unit is 1, regardless of whether it is assigned to point or span features and work locations. The Linear setting is typically used for span units and any other units based on linear costing.

A unit is designated as linear by selecting the Linear setting on either the New Compatible Units dialog box or the Compatible Unit Properties dialog box.

Retired Units

A retired compatible unit is one that is obsolete and no longer available for new construction. Macro units that contain a retired compatible unit are also considered retired. Retired units are kept in the database to support older designs and change-out and abandonment operations.

Obsolete units are flagged in an external system. This information is loaded in the Bentley OpenUtilities Designer database, and a unit's retired state is reflected in the Retired and Retired Date properties on the Compatible Unit Properties dialog box. Once a unit is retired, its properties are no longer editable. A retired unit can be opened in the Unit Assistant window, but only in read-only mode.

A retired unit has the following characteristics:

It cannot be assigned to new designs unless it has a status of Proposed Remove or Proposed Abandon.
It cannot be pinned to a feature for automatic assignment.
If pinned to a feature before it was retired, it cannot be automatically assigned to a design unless the global attribute value for Life Cycle Status is set to Proposed Remove or Proposed Abandon.
It cannot be copied from an older design to a new design unless its status is Proposed Remove or Proposed Abandon.
Its status cannot be changed to Proposed Install.

The Show Retired Units option on the View menu determines whether retired units are displayed in the Units view, the Units Catalog, and the list of matched items in the Find dialog box. When this option is selected, retired units are not filtered out.

Show Retired Units option (View menu)