Project Scheduling

[worth]

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.

[burn_this_city]

We use Primavera P6 for scheduling on a major construction project. Might be more than you're looking for in cost and complexity.

[worth]

I was trying to do some research on Primavera P6, but there aren't a ton of intro videos on it, and i know major corporations use it with thousands of employees and on massive projects, so it may be overkill for my application, as you say.

Do you have any first hand experience with it?

[burn_this_city]

No, I'm not a scheduler unfortunately. I see what they generate out of it, but I haven't got a clue how easy it is to use ect.

[MelBridgeman]

Replicon Web Timesheet

www.replicon.com

[Kybosh]

PM'd

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by worth

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.

If you were looking for an end to end solution that includes a project management through to core financial I could help you out.

I work with three solutions. Deltek Vision, Dynamics SL and Dynamics ax.

I only deal with project based organizations.

In your case Deltek Vision isn't the best one to look at, its limited on the manufacturing side. SL and AX are both strong in the things you are looking for. But they are end to end ERP's.

If you do want to talk about it, PM me, and we can set something up.

If not, no big deal.

[V]

We use Primavera P6 for all of our planning. Extremely powerful, but we're working with a 150 million dollar annual program, so we can get our money's worth out of it. It really does pretty much everything we want. I've been really impressed, and if you set the backbone up properly it's extremely easy to use as well. I have no idea what an annual license costs, though.

[V]

Actually, I should mention this, if you have any experience running a program like Primavera, or if you have any experience with planning a construction and maintenance program, we'll be hiring fairly soon. I expect the posting to come up within the next week. PM me for details if you like.

[worth]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

If you were looking for an end to end solution that includes a project management through to core financial I could help you out.

I work with three solutions. Deltek Vision, Dynamics SL and Dynamics ax.

I only deal with project based organizations.

In your case Deltek Vision isn't the best one to look at, its limited on the manufacturing side. SL and AX are both strong in the things you are looking for. But they are end to end ERP's.

If you do want to talk about it, PM me, and we can set something up.

If not, no big deal.

We already use another ERP program, so I'm looking for something standalone for the moment. Maybe in the future when we grow a lot, we will have to look at a fully integrated ERP system that includes complete project Management. I'll take a look at the products you mentioned. Thanks.

We use Primavera P6 for all of our planning. Extremely powerful, but we're working with a 150 million dollar annual program, so we can get our money's worth out of it. It really does pretty much everything we want. I've been really impressed, and if you set the backbone up properly it's extremely easy to use as well. I have no idea what an annual license costs, though.

Yeah, I'm nowhere near that, so P6 is likely overkill for me. And one license is 1600 GBP, which is a little on the high side. Our ERP license is $1,500 a piece. Food for thought. Thanks.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by worth

We already use another ERP program, so I'm looking for something standalone for the moment. Maybe in the future when we grow a lot, we will have to look at a fully integrated ERP system that includes complete project Management. I'll take a look at the products you mentioned. Thanks.

Thanks let me know if you ever want to discuss. Because it sounds like you guys are build to order, and mid sized, Dynamics SL would probably be a really good option, its ability to task and resource manage is excellent, and you can still integrate it with Project Server to make a really great package.




[QUOTE=worth;3572280Yeah, I'm nowhere near that, so P6 is likely overkill for me. And one license is 1600 GBP, which is a little on the high side. Our ERP license is $1,500 a piece. Food for thought. Thanks.[/QUOTE]


Prima is is the nuclear bomb but the investment is steep.

Maybe look through the attached chart for comparisons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...ement_software

[worth]

We are completley build to order. What kind of investment is something like that time wise once it's up an running? Does it require a dedicated person?

[CaptainCrunch]

That's a tough question Worth, I would personally need to know a little bit more about the specifics of what your trying to achieve.

From our perspective, there are two ends to the spectrum.

1) obviously is the project plan and resource management, usually most organizations that we deal with would assign their specific project managers to allocate the resources and ensure that the utilization rate is setup properly.

Bascailly your shifting your person that maintains project over to whatever system you purchase. Where it becomes more difficult is if you want accurate tracking then you have to be aware of the information update cycle in the system.

Some organizations that we deal with have a dedicated person who's role is simply to not only keep the project benchmarks and tasks and personal/materials utilization up to date, but they also have to do it from a global perspective across the organization.

The other issue that comes into play is ensuring that your I guess you call them line people are keeping their activities up to date. In our systems for example that's based around time card entry so that you can track budget against actual.

Now with a lot of the more advanced smarter systems a lot of that can be automated if your projects follow similar templates.

Usually with our clients they lose a bit of time on maintaining the system and managing the manufacturing process, but they gain quite a bit of time in terms of increased efficiencies that are seen on the floor for example.

The real benefit though of project management software is usually realized via cost control.

[migsbenz]

I am looking for the same kind of thing, I schedule the concrete phases of construction projects. Looking for something that works on both Mac and PC.

Thanks