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Link-Miles flies on course
Background In the space of just one hour, it is possible to fly a Boeing 747 through low level cloud to a perfect night-time touchdown in Hong Kong, to fly through a snow storm and make a safe landing at Boston, and to take off through mist and rain from London Heathrow Airport. "PLANTRAC & BARoNET could be used right across the company ...very few packages provide this degree of functionality." At the Link-Miles facility in Lancing, near Worthing, they design and develop advanced training simulators for commercial and military aircraft. With movement in all six degrees for freedom, realistic sound effects and richly textured visuals so that runways appear very real, waves lap on seashores and winds ripple through grass; you really do feel you are flying. Link-Miles also produce simulators for submarines, tanks and space vehicles. The Company is a world leader in this highly complex and leading-edge, technology market. All Link-Miles simulators are customised to client's specifications, and are often of a prototype nature. Technically, Link-Miles are superior to most of their competitors -a reputation they guard jealously. Their aim is to provide the best simulators on a customised basis. This objective obviously increases the need for planning and control, particularly as competition intensifies and already tight timescales become tighter. To help them achieve this objective, the Company is using a total of 30 PLANTRAC II and 5 BARoNET PC-based project management packages from Computerline.The Initial Problem Previous project management systems had been mainframe compuier-based and consequently relatively slow, restricted to certain functions within the Company and available to only a limited number of specialist planning personnel. This procedure made it difficult to accurately manage and control a multi-task and multi-project structure operating under a matrix management. Revised policies dictated that the people actually doing the work, engineers, designers etc. should be responsible for the progress of schedules and cost control, while the project management function was elevated to accomplish overall Company tasks, i.e. setting targets, setting timescales and overall parameters and then monitoring operations against them. To adopt the existing mainframe systems would have been impractical, prohibitively costly and highly disruptive, therefore an alternative solution had to be found. The Computerline Answer After further deliberations, Link-Miles chose the Computerline solution because it complemented the overall Company IT strategy which was to move increasingly towards PC-based solutions as they became more and more powerful and cost effective. Furthermore, a PC-based system, correctly chosen, could be used by the actual work groups independently. The criteria affecting the choice of their PC based system were: that it should be user friendly, easy to install and that it should have the potential expansion capability to integrate with other Company PC based systems running spreadsheets and databases etc. Cost was also a major consideration."Computerline's PLANTRAC 11 and BARoNET products were selected because they can be used right across the Company ", said Colin Robinson, Head of Operational Planning, Link-Miles. "They are compatible, user friendly and they integrate with all our other PC-based packages." "They will communicate with our mainframe programs and hook into our Ethernet network. Furthermore they also provide extensive database facilities and links with our costing department. There are very few packages on the market which can provide this degree of functionality ". PLANTRAC and BARoNET in Use PLANTRAC II is used in control planning, project management and other areas of the Company and also by operational groups - R&D, testing and the various manufacturing areas. BARoNET is being used as an entry point by those engineers who are not planning experts. "They like it because it is easy to use and understand, and they can actually see the bar charts - it is as if they arc-planning with pen and paper," said Colin Robinson. "Data from BARoNET is automatically converted into PLANTRAC formats." PLANTRAC II is used for all levels of reporting including reports from the Company to the client and three levels of in-house reporting. Precedence is the chosen presentation method. Information provided to Central Planning by the groups, is processed on a multi-project and multi-departmental basis to provide total priorities information to the whole company on the entire operation. Corporate Planning also sets and re-sets target dates for the departments to achieve subsets of activities. The Benefits In the departments, resource schedules are produced and both levelled and limited resource scheduling used to play "what if" scenarios. This exercise is particularly beneficial when considering the impact of potential new business on their manpower resources, etc.The Baseline feature of PLANTRAC II is used to monitor scheduled performance against original estimates. "When we analyse performance in terms of costs, we shall use the Earned Value System - an enhancement to PLANTRAC II. It is a system which compares budgeted costs of work scheduled and budgeted cost of work performance with actual performance," commented Colin Robinson. "From this monitoring, we can develop a predictive capability which will allow us to take corrective action in time to avoid situations developing into crises", he added. One of the major advantages of PLANTRAC II for Link-Miles is its database and library functions. The Company plans to reap the benefits more and more by storing information and experiences and drawing on them to avoid "re-inventing the wheel".Future Developments Link-Miles are also planning to use PLANTRAC II's Integrated Schedule Analysis capability. They will integrate departmental scheduling as deemed necessary i.e. unique situations or potential problem areas to give groups a more realistic picture of progress.It is also planned to feed PLANTRAC II resourcing schedules into the costing department for further automated cost control. PLANTRAC II's communications facility OPENTRAC will enable the data to be transferred to the Costing Department's SMART II spreadsheet and database."All in all, we are very happy with PLANTRAC II" said Colin Robinson. "There are very few packages on the market which can provide this degree of functionality at the right price. PLANTRAC really helps us to fly on course" |
