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

• New Recipe Types: Are you tired of using workarounds and adding placeholders to simulate demolition activities? There is now a dedicated Recipe Type for Temporary works and Demolition so that they can be effectively managed in ALICE. For more information, please refer to Temporary and Demolition Recipes.

•  Demolition Recipes; you can now use demolition recipes for all the elements that need demolishing as well as having an infinitely better experience when using ALICE for brownfield projects.

• Temporary Recipes; you can now use dedicated recipes for temporary structures, e.g. scaffolding and other temporary works.

• Import Menu for Recipe Matrix: Do you prefer to import recipes from Excel? This new feature will allow you to completely customize your imports, import from different projects, and choose which recipes to skip or overwrite. For more information, please refer to Importing of Recipe Matrix - Update June 2020.

• Active Constraints on Gantt: Have you ever wondered why an activity is starting on a specific date in your schedule? Is it because of crew availability? Material? Equipment? Or structural support requirements? Well, now you can know with certainty and specificity by simply clicking on the task in the Gantt. ALICE will tell you what constraint(s) drove any activity to its specific start date so that you can better understand what’s actually happening in your schedule without speculation.

• Infeasibility Check for Crew Supply: If you have activities in your projects that require a minimum of 3 crews, and then you try to run a simulation with less… ALICE now warns and blocks you from running that simulation unless the minimum amount of required crews is provided. This is incredibly useful for avoiding infeasibility in crew/workforce reduction scenarios.

• Bulk Edit/Delete UDFs: This refers to being able to bulk delete or change the name of UDFs in bulk. Previously bulk actions were only available for UDFs values, but now we can also apply them to UDF names.

• Milestones & Resource Logic in P6 XML export: P6 XML exports coming from ALICE now include milestones, as well as the logic links coming from resources (active drivers). This means that we now recommend the P6 XML over the XER export (which will soon be discontinued from ALICE)

• Separated Crew Idle Cost in Cost Curve: Many customers have expressed interest in separating idle from direct costs for crews in the cost over time curve. This is now available with the purple line showing idle crew costs.

• Cost over time CSV export: This new CSV export includes all the breakdowns you can imagine! Labor vs Equipment vs Material, Direct vs Idle, Consumable vs Idle, Totals by type, totals by Subcontractor, etc.

Improvements

• Autofill for UDF names: Assigning UDFs can be an error-prone process since all UDF names for the same variable need to match in terms of spelling. This is now made easier by having an autofill dropdown when creating UDFs.

• Add Material to Cost-over-time CSV: Both consumable and reusable materials are now included in the cost over time CSV.

• New Design for recipe list: The recipe list is now a table that allows for many new filtering and sorting capabilities. It also looks pretty dope.

• Shift+Select for group tree: Shift+Select now also applies to groups in the selections tree.

•  No Crew Required Label: the label on task tray cards for operations that don’t require a crew would read “no crew required undefined”. This is now changed to “No Crew Required”.

• Hover-over tooltip for cost over-time graph: Improvements to the cost over time graph now make it available to hover over anywhere in the graph and easily read the breakdown of values.

• Calendars in P6 XML: Full ALICE calendars are now included in the P6 XML export. This is much better than the previous workweeks approach (also currently in XER). Please watch the accompanying video if you want to learn more.

• Crane Costs in Explore and Analytics: Crane costs are now computed in Explore and Analytics breakdowns (as equipment). We will be adding them to cost over time and CSV soon.

• Invitation Process Improvements: Customers can now invite any user from any project, and the auto-complete feature is undone.

• Allow Import of Multiple Rates/Cranes/Equipment in Recipe Matrix: Do your recipes include multiple rates/cranes/equipment assigned to the same operation? With this new improvement, you can import them all at once, rather than having to add the others manually in ALICE.