Plans
Plans in BuilderZen Foundations have a slightly different meaning than plans in other systems or plans on paper or plans in CAD.
Note
A plan can be any of the following:
- A single family home, including all elevations for that home.
- A multi-family building, including the shell, individual units, and all elevations.
- Reusable material – general plan information that can be applied to many other single family or multi-family homes.
- For example, a separate plan can be built for a 3-car garage. That plan can then be reused as a part of several single family homes. By doing this, the 3-car garage estimate needs only to occur once, and then can be applied many times.
Plans represent a superset of a typical "plan" and contain every possible way a plan can be built and sold. This is achieved by the use of both Choices (covered earlier in this section) and the use of Layers (covered below).
This plan superset is then filtered when the available plan configurations, standard features and standard options are designated at the Community level (covered in the next section).
This topic is covered in greater detail in the Plans section.
Layers
Plans are made up of modular components or building blocks called "layers."
Plan Layers serve as reusable buckets/containers that can be used to group together takeoff materials according to when the materials are needed.
Example
An example Plan 2000 could have three different Elevations (A, B, and C).
Much of the material needed to build each version stays the same, and some of the material needed to build each elevation is different. All of the material that is unique to Elevation A can be built in an Elevation A layer, and so on. By entering the material in separate layers, the base layer can be combined with each elevation layer to bring all of the takeoff items together in the appropriate combination.
This "layered" combination is called a "Sales Configuration" and represents a sellable plan configuration that can be sold in a Community.
This topic is covered in greater detail in the Plan Layers area of the Plans section.
Sales Configurations
Plan Sales Configurations represent sellable plan configurations that can be sold in a given Community.
Typically, Plan Sales Configurations consist of a base layer and an elevation layer to bring all of the takeoff items together in the appropriate combination. Plan Sales Configurations may also contain other shared "interchangeable" layers, such as two or three car garage or deck layers that can be used with multiple plan configurations.
This topic is covered in greater detail in the Sales Configuration area of the Plans section.