Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback about ALICE! We have been listening and working to build the best product for construction planning and scheduling. Here are the improvements that have been completed in March:

What is New?

Milestones

• You can now easily define important events in your project, such as the completion of the structure, the building becoming water-tight or the completion of a work package, and those dates for those events will clearly be shown in each schedule so that you can better evaluate your options.

Interactive 4D Filters

• When you filter the Gantt chart, should the 4D view also get filtered to show the same scope? Or should it remain untouched to provide context? Now you can decide and go back and forth just with one button!  

Import Recipe Matrix from Excel

• Excel is excellent! Maybe that’s why our customers like to punch in all their recipe data there, but what happens when they need to get all that data into ALICE? - We thought you’d never ask! They import it of course! Note that for this first release, the precedence arrows will not be automatically drawn… offering the chance to draw them during your recipe review.

Assign Building & Zone parameters in Bulk

Yes, it’s true! You can literally zone and define your buildings and have them ready for auto-grouping in minutes, by working with multiple element selections. Try it out!

Crane Parameters in Schedule Comparison

Crane availability parameters can now be compared between schedules in the compare schedules window. You may need to refresh the page after a new simulation run to get the most recent data.

Protect deleting shared projects

ALICE will now give a specific warning when you’re about to delete a project that is shared with other collaborators… just to be on the safe side...

New Filters UI

Filtering your schedule and analytics has just become lightyears easier! Enter a new chapter in life, where filtering data is the easiest, most intuitive, and coolest thing ever! Stay tuned for the internal video showing how to make the most out of this new functionality. 

Sync Task Tray Cars with a selected time window

You know how we can switch our time increment between hour/day/week/month when navigating our 4D schedules? What happens if the task cards shown in the task tray represented all the tasks happening during that time window? Instant interactive look-ahead filter? Yes please sir!

Resetting a Password

• Have you ever created a really cool password with all the bells and whistles (numbers, characters, etc… you name it) and then somehow forgot it? ALICE now allows you to reset your password!

Improvements

• Shorter waiting time to create new schedules: Every time you open the explore page, you have to wait for quite a bit before you can create new simulations, right? Well, not anymore! It’s near-instant now!

• Used number crews in Schedule comparison: Now you can compare how many crews Alice is actually using for the schedule solution, not just how many there are available… Pretty cool eh?

• Model Upload Optimization: You want faster model uploads? You got it!

• Updated Resource Icons In Recipe Cards: Resource Icons for operation cards are now updated and show up in the right order!

• Front end validation for model uploads: ALICE supports RVT, NWC, and NWD model uploads. Before this release, users who upload other file types would get a failed upload. Now ALICE won’t allow users to upload incompatible file types or files larger than 1GB in the first place!

• Scheduler engine improvements: Improvements to the scheduler infrastructure increase resiliency, provide better error messages on the backend and allow for more future features to be added.

• Predecessor arrows included in Recipe Matrix Import: An extra column was added to the excel template that will allow you to define precedence relationships. Your excel imports will now automatically generate all precedence relationships in ALICE!

• Clean error propagation and reporting: So you keep getting an “infeasible schedule” error but can’t figure out why? We got your back fam! New error reporting features on the backend will allow our team to give you an answer in no time!

• Ignore Password Reset for SSO users: The whole point of SSO is to not worry about passwords. That’s why password reset is disabled for SSO users.

• Allow  Password Reset for select SSO users: Okay, I take back what I said in the previous bullet point. Apparently, some organizations that use SSO still want to be able to reset passwords. Now we can support both!

• Better Asset Caching: Did you just spend a whole minute waiting for a large project to load only to realize you have to wait again after refreshing the page? That’s because our infrastructure only supported asset caching for up to one hour. We can now go up to a whole year!

• Create Objectives Builder: This backend functionality enables the ALICE simulator to optimize for custom objectives (in lieu of or in addition to the default: duration and max crews). There’s no change in the product UI yet, but stay tuned!

• Fix division by zero in metrics calculation: Some cases in ALICE that would lead to division by zero in the calculation of metrics would result in the scheduler crashing. This is now fixed.

• Better handling of upload errors: Have you ever had an upload stuck at “processing” forever and ever? ALICE will now detect these errors better if they occur and let you know immediately.

• Updated email when users are invited to an ALICE project: The copyright date is now updated as well as the contents of the email to reflect the fact that we now handle more types of projects.