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Construction Computing Autumn 1991 PLANTRAC ON TRACK IN July, students from many participating countries converged on Sheffield for Universiade 1991 — the World Student Games. The huge Ponds Forge International Sports Centre newly constructed in the heart of the city was the prestigious UK venue for the swimming and volley ball events. PLANTRAC projects management software from Computerize, helped Mowlem Management to plan and monitor the project. The programme was a challenge. From winning the design competition in Autumn 1987, through topping out by HRH The Princess Royal in Spring 1990, to completion in Spring 1991, the combined effort of the project team has been prodigious. A management contract was selected as the most appropriate form of procurement and in excess of 80 works contracts were let between April 1988 and July 1990 with Mowlem Management (part of John Mowlem Construction pic) as the Management Contractor on behalf of the client Sheffield City Council in conjunction with Sheffield for Health Limited. Mowlem Management have been using PLANTRAC for more than five years. The planning engineers on site at Ponds Forge welcomed the choice of PLANTRAC because of ease of use with which its menu-driven features can be used by everyone without the need for a high degree of computer literacy yet combining all the accuracy and sophistication demanded of it by Mowlem's managers.
The multi-project facilities of PLANTRAC were used to the full on the Planning Manager's machine to draw reports from all five sub-projects for a complete management overview by virtue of a well structured hierarchy of codes — responsibility codes and cost codes in particular — together with a banded division and layout of the programme corresponding, wherever possible, to the actual 'division of labour' amongst the management team. Due to the combined size of all the networks and the corresponding extensive progress report that this gave rise to, it was possible by banding/sort codes etc., to arrive at a very useful summary of about forty to fifty report 'centres' distilled out of a combined network easily in excess of 6,000 activities. 'PLANTRAC has many attractive features, some of which have proved their worth on Ponds Forge and justified its choice,' commented Stan Hatton, Planning Manager, John Mowlem Construction pic. 'It is a capable workhorse on major networks and provides powerful and extensive sorting facilities for analysis and reporting. Moreover, the reporting options can be readily enhanced and very easily customised. 'We also appreciated the powerful import/export capabilities with spreadsheets and databases, thus furthering the potential for analysis and reporting to other environments. 'Furthermore, the reporting style is very readable, and we certainly appreciate the magnificent support and advice provided throughout, by the staff at Computerline over a period of many months. 'PLANTRAC helped us to plan and keep the Ponds Forge International Sports Centre project on track.' |
At the Sheffield site, PLANTRAC was used
on stand-alone Olivetti M/380C personal computers with outputs to dot
matrix printer and plotter. The programme evolved, beginning life as a
single network. With experience and a rapidly expanding network, the
planning team found that breaking the job down into five stand-alone
sub-projects and, spreading the workload between them across two
computers, ultimately gave them the most manageable solution.