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worth · 02-27-2012, 08:48 PM

I'm looking for some advice on Project Scheduling software.

I work for a manufacturing company. We build our products in our facility. They are projects that take about one month of engineering time and three months of fabrication time to complete.

At any given time, we have about 40 major projects on the go and there are about ~60 shop floor employees.

We currently use MS Project to schedule these projects. I do not schedule resources into our projects. I only schedule the project itself, dividing it out into its sub tasks. Each project is divided out into about 50-60 tasks that must be completed in order to finish the project.

I use my experience to schedule each job and predict when each one will be done, and what possible problems I can foresee in bottlenecks and that sort of thing.

The problem I have is I have only ever used MS Project, and I do not know if this is the best software for the application I am using it in.

Does anyone have any experience with other software I can check out?

Keep in mind I am not a Project Scheduler. I have many other tasks other than scheduling, so I cannot spend hours per day detailing a schedule. Perhaps if I knew we were using the correct tool to schedule, I would hire someone to do full time scheduling, but I am not about to hire someone based on the MS Project platform.

I want to become more efficient and better at predicting shortfalls in labour and plant capacity. I don’t think I can do this with MS Project without investing a substantial amount of time. Managing 60 employees over 40 different projects day to day sounds nearly impossible to me, but I’m sure there is something out there that does it.

Any advice anyone has or recommendations they can make would be most appreciated.

02-27-2012, 08:48 PM	#1
worth Franchise Player Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Vancouver Exp:	Project Scheduling I'm looking for some advice on Project Scheduling software. I work for a manufacturing company. We build our products in our facility. They are projects that take about one month of engineering time and three months of fabrication time to complete. At any given time, we have about 40 major projects on the go and there are about ~60 shop floor employees. We currently use MS Project to schedule these projects. I do not schedule resources into our projects. I only schedule the project itself, dividing it out into its sub tasks. Each project is divided out into about 50-60 tasks that must be completed in order to finish the project. I use my experience to schedule each job and predict when each one will be done, and what possible problems I can foresee in bottlenecks and that sort of thing. The problem I have is I have only ever used MS Project, and I do not know if this is the best software for the application I am using it in. Does anyone have any experience with other software I can check out? Keep in mind I am not a Project Scheduler. I have many other tasks other than scheduling, so I cannot spend hours per day detailing a schedule. Perhaps if I knew we were using the correct tool to schedule, I would hire someone to do full time scheduling, but I am not about to hire someone based on the MS Project platform. I want to become more efficient and better at predicting shortfalls in labour and plant capacity. I don’t think I can do this with MS Project without investing a substantial amount of time. Managing 60 employees over 40 different projects day to day sounds nearly impossible to me, but I’m sure there is something out there that does it. Any advice anyone has or recommendations they can make would be most appreciated.