Tech & Innovation
THE FUTURE OF SCHEDULING
By Garrett Harley, Product Marketing Director, Oracle Construction & Engineering
Previewing the future of scheduling A more coordinated and collaborative schedule blends the approaches of how work is both planned and managed. It is inclusive of all team members, and unites the critical path (in the CPM schedule) with field task and risk management. It provides a view that businesses need to efficiently plan, schedule, and control programs and individual projects. One development helping to identify potential risks and inefficiencies early in the project schedule is through the use of AI. Organizations who analyze their company’s existing historical project data and combine it with their internal knowledge base, can generate an improved quality of schedule by using AI to evaluate scenarios in real time. They can determine the best project plans and mitigate risks, as well as optimize resources across project teams and track progress. As with all AI integrations, your team’s success will be dependent upon having an up-to-date, reliable repository that can centralize all your team members, project information, and the stream of new data. To ensure a successful project, all stakeholders—from the C-suite to the job site—need high levels of coordination, compliance, consistency, and control. Using a single, integrated CPM and task management schedule for construction projects, programs, and enterprises helps empower organizations to deliver on all of these requirements. Additionally, any blocks to communication or process can have an impact on accuracy and, ultimately, your team’s project delivery and cost. That’s why it’s essential for you to have a clean workflow and effective task management in place that both field and office teams can respond to. Once your data and task management processes are in order, AI can help your team build baseline schedules based on request for proposal (RFP) information. This may help scheduler reduce their prep time and focus on scheduled activities. With the use of an AI tool, your scheduler can accomplish in about three hours what used to take three days, giving time back to the scheduler to focus on work more efficiently and focus on other tasks.
As the world pivots into a new, AI-powered future , many industries are changing rapidly to accommodate new tools and new capabilities. The construction industry, in particular, is beginning to see a change in the culturally entrenched attitudes towards project management as organizations look to modernize their operations. One long-entrenched process—creating the schedule—is an area that has long been in need of a makeover. The schedule is the beating heart of every project, providing the road map that every team member will base their work around. It has traditionally been the expertise of a single scheduler that dictates the quality of the schedule, but now organizations can use AI-powered scheduling tools that can unite the entire team’s data to generate an all-encompassing first draft to make that scheduler’s life easier. Connecting the office and the field Today, a schedule needs to be multi-dimensional. It has to consider the summary of activities found in the scope of work of the contract, as well as the field level production details based on the guide rails in these summaries. Great scheduling combines the needs of the field and the front and back office. As the complexity and duration of construction projects continue to increase, so do the number of specialized team members involved on a project—as well as the intricacies of a schedule. The more members that are added to the project team, the more mature the schedule should become, adding depth and establishing a more thorough plan for every member of your team. Incorporating metrics related to key milestones, deliverables, and productivity targets can help coordinate and optimize labor, equipment, and material resources both within and across all projects of an organization. Given today’s supply shortages and material delays, being able to account for disruptions in the schedule in near real time becomes even more important. As organizations in the industry continue to reimagine the workspace and analyze how they can assemble and mobilize staff quickly, they are also considering how they can effectively digitize more of the workforce while adapting to more mobile and remote working approaches. The schedule needs to be able to quickly account for scaling up and down this more diversified team and ensuring everyone is informed and aligned and working towards the common project goal.
28 Summer 2024
csengineermag.com
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