This month we’ve been focused on features that help users understand the schedules generated with ALICE and make data-driven decisions on the best schedule for their project.

Major Features:

• Gantt Overlay and Variance Analysis 
  • Compare two schedules line by line with a visual overlay to quickly spot the key differences. 
  • Variance columns highlight the differences between the tasks in the two schedules with regards to workday, start date and end date. Schedules can be sorted by variance to accelerate your analysis. 

• Custom Axes on the Explore page
  • Select custom x and y axes from a dropdown menu to display your solutions on axes that are most relevant to your project, such as cost or crew utilization. Your selections will be saved at the project level, ensuring your preferred configuration is preserved every time you view the project.
  • Available options to configure your custom solutions graph in ALICE:
    • X axis: Calendar days, Working days, Project end dates
    • Y axis: Cost, Overall Crew Utilization, Critical tasks, Longest path tasks 

Additional Updates:

Platform

• Auto-saved Gantt Views (Plan + Analyze) 
  • When a Gantt view is customized, settings will be automatically saved and shown the next time the project is opened, making it easier for users to navigate schedules quickly.
• Gantt Views (Plan and Analyze) can now be filtered by ‘no crews’, making it easier to spot tasks without assigned resources and quickly resource load.
• Schedules can now be exported in Microsoft Project XML format. 

Plan

• Apply Crew Ranges Automatically to Duration Formulas. 
  • Now, when a user assigns a min and max crew range, ALICE will offer to automatically apply the range value to any formula fields for tasks associated with the assigned crew. 
  • This includes material, equipment or planned duration formula fields. Users can get all the optimization power of crew ranges with much less setup effort.
• New formula variables: When creating formulas for material, equipment or planned duration formulas there are two new variables:
  • Primary crew count returns the number of crews for the primary crew.
  • Workforce count returns the sum of (crew size * number of crews) for all crew types assigned to the task.
• Task relationship details are now visible in the plan page (previously only visible in Analyze) to improve the ease of planning in ALICE.
• LOE (Level of Effort) tasks are now visually indicated with a blue icon, based on user requests to make them easier to find.
• Multiple relationships between two tasks are now displayed and can be modified via the predecessor or successor columns
• ‘Planned Duration’ and ‘Planned Duration formula’ columns have been combined into one column that will show the computed value by default, and show the formula (if one exists) when in edit mode. Read to learn more.
• Constraint Type and Constraint Date columns have been combined into one column that allows users to assign both the type and date at once. We believe it’s a simpler way to assign constraints.

Analyze

• Workforce utilization charts have been added to the Analytics view on the Analyze page, so users can see for themselves that any workforce limits are not violated. This chart is exportable.
• French and German characters are now supported in .csv file exports.