I am looking for some guidance and personal experiences of programme scheduling for repetitive work on numerous sites. Although this relates to construction work, I feel sure the same principles would apply to inspection or maintenance schedules as well.
Eg…Project A has 50 sites, each with five distinct activities (each a different trade/subcontractor). The sequence of activities is always the same, but as each site is unique, the durations will vary. Because of time restrictions, each subcontractor will provide multiple gangs; so there will be multiple work strings (in this case geographic areas) ongoing at any one time.
The goals of the programme and project are:
- Finish all the work in the shortest time possible (as always!)
- Finish each site in a timely fashion (as we are accessing operational infrastructure).
- Keep each subcontractor continually employed (to avoid any stand down charges etc).
With such a high number of sites in progress at any one time, there are the inevitable daily changes which require re-sequencing. We are currently using traditional methods on a gantt chart (MS Project sadly), but there is so much inter-site and inter-trade logic to amend manually that it really becomes unmanageable. We have resorted to use a weekly schedule on Excel, but that does not show effects on the end date immediately.
We are trying out various methods involving resource levelling, priorities etc, but they each seem to be equally labour intensive and cannot satisfy all the three goals above. We are also investigating use of Vico or other ‘scheduling’ type software with a line of balance feature.
Has anyone encountered similar work and can provide any help in this field? All software recommendation, tips and techniques welcomed.
Thanks,
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