Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback about ALICE! We have been listening and working to build the best generative construction simulation solution. Here are the improvements that have been completed in June:

New features

• Ability to turn off idle costs for specific crews/equipment: Do some of your subcontractors work on a unit price contract and therefore do not get paid for idle time? You can now account for that in your what-if scenario simulations by disabling idle cost calculations for those crews.

• Modify Recipe assignment in excel: The tabular data format display in Alice is evolving. On top of Support logic, you can now add/delete Recipes from the respective column making the review and change management process faster. Moreover, schedulers can build their Alice plan much faster by transferring or copy pasting information from external sources, e.g.Recipe matrix or P6.

• Input verification in Explore page: Validations in Explore page are now more robust, preventing page load failures as well as including visual safeguards for the user e.g. error notification when putting 0 crews available in a scenario. The solution exploration, therefore, becomes more seamless as schedulers will be “protected” from creating infeasible schedules.

• Custom WBS option in Gantt view: On top of the default WBS options available, you can now build your own WBS hierarchy using a variety of parameters e.g. Recipe, operation, sub etc… even your own custom properties! Schedulers can now abide by any organization/owner standards but also map and compare ALICE output to existing cpm schedules. Pro Tip: Shuffle levels around until you get exactly what you want…

• Isolate path with same precedence on Gantt: You can now isolate a specific path in the Alice Gantt to focus on a particular flow of work. Schedulers can now read, analyze and comprehend a solution much faster and with less errors no matter the number of line items.

• Gantt only view: You can now access a full screen view in the gantt while still being able to access all the criticality features, including relationship details. This will allow users to take advantage of the new criticality features while digging deeper into each schedule solution.

Improvements

• Add time picker in Manage status update UI: You are now able to add the specific time of day and activity that was started/finished from the UI in addition to the date. This will allow for greater accuracy when tracking progress as well as when reviewing analytics.
• Improve Explore page snapshotting performance: Saving the plan data operation was quite slow for a portion of the projects. That was resulting in the scheduler not picking the latest plan parameter values and sometimes even the Explore page failed to load. Operation performance has improved so change the Plan to your heart’s content.
• Better Resource requirement checking: The resource requirement checker on the Explore page has been improved to account for material and equipment minimum requirements, including requirements incurred from using SaS/FaS type relationships, and now also provides the user with information on which recipes/operations control those requirements.