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The Client

Design, manufacture, assembly and first and second-fix installation of galvanised steel air conditioning ductwork.

The Task

Optimisation of design, fabrication and installation manpower resources to meet their Client's site programme constraints.

Background

The Company had a database which it used to collate work in progress and resource cost data for each job completed. The system could not forward schedule however and the introduction of Windows 95 provided an opportunity to re-think the old paper planning systems and consider co-ordinating resource management and forward planning.

Specification

Hornet were asked to provide a system that would plan current and future resource for multiple projects. In particular, the system should provide reports that:

• list all projects, with an option to restrict to a specified range
• include all project tasks, with an option to restrict to a specified range
• allow the required start date for the report to be user-defined
• show values for each resource (design, fabrication, installation)
• list values on a daily or weekly basis
• provide resource (manpower) values in men/day and man-hours
• show values rounded to whole units
• provide optional inclusion of total values across the page
• automatic multi-sheet options for reporting on large projects
• include company headers, footers, logos and legends
• allow previous settings to be recalled via a standard report mask
• provide optional generation of the full range of reports
• are tabular, laser printed at A4

What Hornet did

In addition to providing the above, Hornet added functionality to allow:

• the user to split a current task to represent non-continuous operation
• inclusion of task status as well as man-hours
• setting of optional user-defined default values
• for multi-project applications, listing of resource requirements for each project in turn, summarising total usage and running up to four reports simultaneously
• for single project applications, listing of the resource requirements for up to 8 resources down the page with the option for a row of totals.

The Outcome

The Client now has a forward-planning system capable of producing custom reports to his specification showing current and future manpower resource requirements - greatly facilitating optimisation of resources. A new report has been added to Hornet Windmill's standard Menus that can be made available to other users