DEC COMPUTING 11 MAY 1988

FEATURE/PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Small solutions can often be writ large

A new entrant into the highly competitive world of project management on the VAX comes from an unexpected source. Computerline has done well selling its systems on micros and now looks to step up into a new market.

Plantrac, the project management system from Surrey based Computerline, is a much travelled package. It began life as a system for mainframes, was fully developed and enhanced as a microcomputer package and now it has returned to the work of large systems with a version being announced for the VAX. As a microcomputer system it has become one of the best selling systems in a market uniquely dominated by British products.

For the move to the VAX, Plantrac has been completely rewritten in C and is available across the full range running under VMS; it is also very cheap. The licence for upto four users is £5,500 with each set of four additional users adding just £2,500. In a market replete with systems costing upwards of £30,000, Computerline's managing director, Walford Pears, is confident of Plantrac's success in the VAX/ VMS marketplace.

"We have introduced a VAX version because of pressure from our users," says Pears. "We have made a lot of sales of the microcomputer package into VAX sites and many of these now want to use the power of a larger system."

Plantrac: happy on an Amstrad or a VAX.

While Plantrac has been Computerline's most successful product, the company has a lot of experience in the mainframe and mini arena witli a bureau service running on nine VAXs and two ICL 2900s. In fact the company started life as a bureau when founders Pears and Peter Rowe picked up a spare ICL man-frame.

The ICL 1900. very powerful in its day. had been bought by BAC(now British Aerospace) to design the BAC 311. When the government scrapped the project in the wake of the Concorde fiasco. Pears and Rowe took over the mainframe. One of the first services they provided was project management.

Around 1978, Pears saw his first self-contained microcomputer system in a shop window and intrigued tried it out with a Fortran test program which he quickly converted to Basic. Amazed when it ran and impressed with the micros screen handling, Pears bought a Z-80 based Tandy TRS-80 and began to examine its potential as a front-end processor to the mainframe. It is probably safe to say that not many companies were treating the microcomputer with so much respect back in 1978, but Pears was certain of its potential.

"As far as screen handling and the user interface was concerned you could do so much with a micro that you could not with the mainframe," he says. At first the micro was used for data input and then for enquiries and report generation. By 1979 there was a full blown version of Plantrac for microcomputers and now the system is available for machines running CP/M, MSDOS, Unix, Xenix and Sun-OS. It is one of the first packages to be made available on the Sun 386i.

Pears believes that Computerline has immense experience in the project management field and that this is necessary for success in such a competititve market with so many products available. This plethora of products he also believes creates confusion for users.

"There are no standards in project management," Pears maintains. "The industry is full of terms like CPA and PERT but there are no standard methods of going about that." In tests, according to Pears, different project management systems given the same inputs can produce radically different results which he believes is often due to simple conceptual errors. "Most packages, for example, do not recognise that an activity can have two floats, one at the beginning and one at the end. Plantrac does and we define the most critical total float (MCTF)."

Plantrac offers the ability to deal with 5,000 activitiess within a sub-project and up to 500,000 overall. The package uses a standard menu-driven user interface and this will be the same on the VMS version. "We have tried to keep the package identical to the micro version."

The VMS version is due out later this month but it is actually the second attempt at this. The first produced a year ago did not do well in trials and so the decision was taken to rewrite it using C.

Plantrac uses its own internal database and Pears is opposed to the idea of running a project managernent system on top of an  RDBMS. "For six or seven years a lot of these systems (RDBMS based ones) could not be updated because of old data. Once a user was hooked on a particular database it is difficult to move. In project management the use of an RDBMS is not necessary if there is a good purpose built DB(File system) in the system." But Plantrac does offer links to an RDBMS, Oracle