Advanced project management with Microsoft Project

FREE powerful reporting engine based on MS Excel Power Pivot (Power BI). Allows creating attractive and easy-to-use MS Excel workbooks with Pivot Tables\Charts of the progress, status and projecting forecast in different ways. Free functionality for projects of any size and complicity, no license required.

 Advance scheduling engine to manage ‘real–life’ tasks ( See details ... ):

• Planning tasks in terms of physical volumes, productivity, performance, resource consumption and other ‘real-world’ parameters.
• Using scaling sets of construction\procurement\payment tasks as templates to ease scheduling of large projects.
• Finance management of tasks\resource ‘IN’ and ‘OUT’ costs over the time. A complete picture of the ‘IN’ (acquire) costs and ‘OUT’ (sale) cost of planned, completed, completed and “signed” works in different slices (by Contractors, Suppliers, Contracts, Alternative WBS etc). Control of the project profitability (VA, Value Added) at any time.
• Possibility to use different item cost of the same resource for different tasks

Procurement Management 

•  Using special tasks for planning of material\equipment procurement.
•  Managing in separate ways the cost of tasks performed by the Contractors and the cost of materials (equipment, machines / mechanisms) purchased (leased) from the Suppliers. It makes possible to balance ‘construction’ tasks and ‘procurement’ tasks in time to reduce storage costs, avoid shortages and overspending.

Payments planning and tracking (Cash Flows).

• Developing optimal payment schedule at the planning phase. Avoiding cash gaps, optimal loan planning, etc.
• Easy and operative control of Contractors payment schedule depending on progress of their work.

Getting actual of what has been done by using MS Excel exchange forms.

ExForm is an engine targeted on effective data exchange between project schedule and users who are involved in task executing, approving or even task planning. It allows Project Manger to get all project-related data from teammates, resources and other stakeholders just by using MS Project standard and Excel.

 ... and more MS Project powering features.

 

In many cases, project data should be reported to stakeholders who do not have MS Project installed or not experienced enough to work with. MS Project reporting to MS Excel or other visualization software are limited. Export to MS Excel allows to generate only the plain tables of project tasks, resources and assignments which is hard to use for analyzing the project progress, status, forecast, etc. Visual Reports on ‘Report’ tab are closer to analytical needs, however, their customization is not easy, and the resulting Pivot Tables in MS Excel could not be sent to any other keeping full functionality (internal structures with initial ‘local cube’ data are required to make Excel Pivot Tables working).

The reporting engine of Construction Project Add-In is designed to help MS Project users to get comfortable and ‘self-sufficient’ Excel/PowerBI reports. It is free and can be used for any projects. CP reporting generates Excel/PowerBI files with customizable Excel Pivot Tables and PowerBI visualizations based on active project data.

CP-reporting engine does the following:      

• upload selected MS Project fields as row data to hidden ‘RawData’sheet of specially designed Excel template.
• Filled MS Excel template generates Power Pivot model to produce all required ‘good-looking’ Dimensions and Measures from row data loaded from active project.
• Dimensions and Measures is available to select from PivotTables Fields when you insert either PivotTable or PivotChart to Excel sheet.
• Default Reports have already created many of measures and dimensions commonly used in projects (Tasks, Resources, Time, Costs, Work, Duration, %Complete, Baselines e.t.c) and it is also possible to add new ones based on any MS Project custom fields uploaded (There is no hidden code used, everything can be viewed and modified in PowerPivot model)
• Power BI report is generated in similar way, but it does not take data from project directly. Excel report is used to take raw data from. Power BI reporting opens Power BI template specified in report settings changes data source to Excel report just generated and then refreshes data after opening. Power BI has similar Model to produce dimensions and measures used in PWBI visualizations.

To check CP-reporting you may install CP-Addin and load ‘Demo Project’ on ‘CP-Construction’ tab to setup default report templates. Open your project and generate report based on default template by clicking on ‘Create’  button in ‘CP-Tools’ tab an selecting ‘Report’ from list. After opening Excel report you can modify one according to your needs and use it as new template for new reports by setting up template in report configuration. Check details here. 

Construction Project installation -  https://cproject.pro/installation/

CP Reports usage - https://cproject.pro/help/reports-overview/

 

Construction project tasks are measured in terms of physical value and measures (10 meters, 5 tons, e.t.c.) and scheduled based on performance, resource consumption and other parameters specific to construction industry. MS Project is well-known tool for project management but no features available to handle construction project tasks in native way. Nevertheless, - it is possible to add functionality by developing so called MS Project Add-In. Construction Project (CP) is one of that we discus below. It adds construction-specific environment to MS Project to allow managing construction projects.

CP-Tasks

CP-Tasks are featured MS Project tasks which look like typical tasks in schedule but are filled with attributes and logic behind to cover construction reality. They all have special pop-up wizards to handle them in terms above. See details …

C-Tasks allow to assign Full physical Volume to MS Project task, calculate multiple costs based on resources assigned, set Contractors, manage task duration from productivity point of view and play with other construction-specific parameters. Pop-Up wizard helps to easy edit and control C-Tasks. It is activated on right-click and looks like on slide below. See details …

Key benefits:

• Task full physical volumes (FV) are distributed over time (timephased). Thus, question like ‘How much m² of Ctask2 (on slide above) has to be done from Date1 to Date2?’ can be easy answered. The same for all tasks and any kind of value - planned, baselined, actual, remaining.
• Advanced cost management. Task cost is calculated as multiply ItemCost by full physical value (FV). ItemCost can be entered manually or calculated based on cost of resources assigned to task. There are also two type of task cost supported, – Cost IN (what we buy) and Cost OUT (price what we sell for). Cost OUT can be used for ‘external’ projects.
• Ease of use, no deep MS Project knowledge is required. CP-tasks wizards handle all internal calculation and show user-friendly structured results.

There are other special tasks accompanying C-tasks to cover construction project needs. F-tasks is used to manage payments and design payment schedule based on C-task progress. P-tasks is designed to handle procurement of gods and services needed for C-task to perform effectively.

Finally, CP-reporting engine helps to analyze construction project data in highly-customizable MS Excel Pivot Tables and Power BI reports. CP-reporting has default report templates covering a lot of typical analytic views for project progress, status, forecast, task/resource usage, financing, etc. Report templates can be copied and customized according to your needs.

Construction Project installation -  https://cproject.pro/installation/