Production plan monitoring features

PP&C provides information and features to help you monitor the progress of ongoing maintenance visits. After updating a production plan with task progress, you detect potential problems, compare the project with the plan that was published previously, and compare the non-routine estimates with the real number of non-routine hours spent. The PP&C screen has the following visual indicators:

• In the Gantt, task bars contain shading, the length of which indicates how much of the work is completed. The percentage value of work completed also appears next to the bar.
• The Activity Details View shows details about the selected task, including the task status, and for each skill required by the task, the number of hours that were originally scheduled, the number of hours of work done, and the estimated number of hours remaining.
• In the Gantt, a warning icon appears next to an activity when there is a problem, for example, if the current schedule means the activity will be completed later than the desired date indicated in its Should End Before date. You select the activity in the Gantt to see the details of the warning in the Warnings panel on the right of the screen. The warning icon looks like this: .
• The Resource Loading Graph indicates when the demand exceeds available resources, and when there are surpluses of resources.

You can create complex filtering criteria or use preset filters to display only the tasks that are of interest to you, for example, to see only the tasks that are on the critical path. Other filtering options include work areas, phases, date ranges, crews and more. You can also filter both the demand (tasks) and the capacity to only those that apply to specific skills or crews.

If the plan includes preset filters to show the information you need to monitor the plan, for example, show only tasks that are late, show only tasks that are exceeding the number of hours scheduled, and so on, you can apply all these preset filters one after the other to easily and quickly see the information that is of interest to you.

Other features include the ability to compare the project with a baseline snapshot of the production plan captured earlier to detect the most significant differences, and the ability to view a report of non-routine work for the project that includes the original non-routine estimates, the actuals non-routine hours spent, and what estimate remains.

You can label individual tasks that you want to monitor more closely as tasks to watch, by selecting the Watch Task option in the Task Properties dialog box. An eye-shaped icon appears next to the task bar in the Gantt, and you can filter the display to show only the tasks to be watched.