For over 80 years, the Manual of Labor Units (MLU) published by Bethesda, Md.-based National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) has been the industry standard for electrical construction estimators and project managers. Beginning this summer, MLU data on the labor required to install thousands of different electrical material items will be available as a real-time database feed through Trade Service, which will make MLU data available electronically for use within various bidding and estimating systems and software.
Users of Trade Service's price and product updating software, TRA-SER Premier, may automatically import the labor units directly from the program into their estimating or accounting database, along with pricing data, and then Trade Service will match the labor units to specific items within TRA-SER so the data can be imported to the contractor's business system database.