Rex Goodnight is a civil engineer with the Southwest Virginia office of the Army Corps of Engineers. We asked him about his experiences with PLANTRAC.

"We use PLANTRAC to help in the planning and construction of industrial plants. Our facilities are part of the Radford Army Munitions Plant in Radford, VA. Most of the facilities we build are chemical production facilities—sulfuric acid, nitric acid, ammonia, etc. We're set up so each of the engineers handles the full range of project management functions: field inspection, job management, letter writing, payments, you name it.

Our job is managing the contract. The contractors give us their schedules for our review. We have the right to reject or modify their schedules. This is important because payments are based on the actual progress of the project.

PLANTRAC helps us evaluate and monitor the contractor's schedule. It gives us the quick sorts and other tools we need to analyze their schedule to make sure it meets our requirements. PLANTRAC also lets us evaluate the impact of change orders. We can use PLANTRAC to ask questions like: "What if we implement this field change order at this point in the project? How much will this delay the completion?"

When I say we use PLANTRAC, I mean we use it a lot. I am currently using PLANTRAC to help manage 8 projects with a total completion value of over $50 million. A project can take from one to three years to complete. At any given time, we may have as many as thirteen active projects. We've been busy and we're getting busier. I wouldn't like to think about trying to maintain my current work load without PLANTRAC.

PLANTRAC can accept input from ASCII files. I don't know of any other program that has the versatility that PLANTRAC has in using ASCII files. This solves a sensitive problem for us. We want our vendors to use CPM, but we can't specify any particular CPM software.

You have to keep in mind that the Army Corps of Engineers, as a U.S. Government Agency, can't endorse a commercial product, but we can require a level of technology. Therefore, we can require vendors to use critical path methodology, but we can't tell them that they must use PLANTRAC.

Because PLANTRAC is so versatile in accepting ASCII files as input, we were able to specify a standard file format. The contractor isn't limited to any particular software package. We simply added a couple of paragraphs to our standard contracts stipulating the format for the ASCII files. We currently receive ASCII file updates from three vendors and four more will come online in the near future.

three vendors and four more will come online in the near future.

PLANTRAC is the only project management program I have seen that gives me the range of features I need. For example, PLANTRAC supports out-of-sequence progress reporting. The contractor may have progressed one activity while at the same time starting another activity which is three activities down his chain. PLANTRAC can handle that.

Yes. Another powerful feature which has been particularly useful to us is the detailed selection feature. PLANTRAC lets you select information from activities using a number of different descriptions. For example, you can select by responsibility codes, or subcontractor codes ... whatever. You can use any coding to select in any way. You can take the details selected from a large schedule and review only those items which are of interest to you at the moment.

In planning a project, make sure you get all the subcontractors involved in the project scheduling. Get all the trades that you can involved. Have them be part of the planning process so they understand and commit to the schedule. The problem I find many times is that subcontractors or even construction superintendents will reject a schedule because they did not have any part in designing that schedule and they don't understand it. If you get these people involved in the planning process it will strengthen that process and result in more realistic project plans.

Get yourself a top notch CPM software package. Don't base your selection on price. The potential savings from a high quality package are many orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the software.