Maintaining Bid Letting Workflow

A workflow describes the relationships between tasks and the order in which those tasks are performed throughout the lifecycle of an agency cost estimate, project, proposal, or contract, and the relationships between those tasks. Each task is a workflow phase.

Workflows align AASHTOWare Project with your business processes. The system includes sample workflows you can customize. You can also add new workflows to describe agency-specific business processes. For example, if your agency organizes new roadway construction projects differently than roadway maintenance projects, you may choose to create one workflow for new projects and another workflow for maintenance projects.

In most cases, the workflow assigned to a project, proposal, or letting remains the same throughout Preconstruction, but the phase is updated as work progresses.

Workflow and phases are set by each agency according to agency-specific procedures. As a user, it is important to understand which phases apply to the work that you do, and when to change the phase. Certain phases can be associated with rules that cause the system to perform certain functions. For example, the Addenda rule restricts certain fields from being changed if an addendum is open, and the system displays a banner alerting you that the proposal is in an addenda phase.

Security constraints can be associated with phases, so that your access can be denied or restricted during those phases. You might find that you can no longer make changes to, or even view, a project, proposal, or letting after you progress it to a certain phase.

Caution: Unless you understand all the rules associated with your workflow phases, it is not recommended to move a phase “backward” in progression.

The Workflow tab of the Bid Letting Summary component displays the current workflow and workflow phase for the bid letting. As the work on managing the bid letting progresses, update the workflow information as appropriate in the following fields:

Click in a field and add, change, or delete information as required.

Click Save when you are finished. The system displays a message to confirm that your changes were saved in the database.