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.
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