Construction Resource Management Software alternative to MS Project?

Member for

21 years 8 months

Consider Spider Project

Spider Project vs. Competition

PMICOS_2011 PPT Presentation Resource Scheduling

It is among the few CPM[Critical Path Method]/RCP[Resource Critical Path] scheduling tools that differentiate effort from resource quantity. The competition lacks this and many other resource planning capabilities as those shown in the following presentation.

Enhanced Resource Planning - Pdf.pdf - Google Drive

Member for

8 years 1 month

Andrew,

It depends on what you are trying to do with it.

I don't see why you would want to move from MS Project to Bridgit, as you would appear to lose a lot of functionality compared to what you have currently. It seems more for assigning personnel to projects rather than for managing the projects themselves.

You could likely do the same in excel!.

Procore seems to be a different application altogether, but again depends what you are after - this seems a lot like a Construction Content Management System.

With both of these options you would still be looking at using MS Project to create any sort of detailed schedule.

It would really depend what you are trying to get out of it that would drive your choice. Both Primavera P6 & Spider Project would be good choices if you are looking at creating detailed schedules (with potentially a steep learning curve for yourself), however given that you seem to be considering swaping MS Project for a Personnel Tracking System (Bridgit), then these may both be overkill for what you require & at additional cost.

The Bridgit / Procore software mentioned above seem to be for different things / functionalities so you should really reconsider what it is you want rather than spending money unecessarily on new software.

Regards,

Steven

Member for

21 years 8 months

The Bridgit software reference is poor, A 100% sales pitch, 0% substance: not enoug details are provided. The reference does not mention the basic planning requirements like: Critical Path analysis, Earned Value Management, leveling for spatial and consumable resources, job cost accounts and financial resource constraints, baseline schedule, schedule risk analysis, Work Breakdown Structures, crew production rates, synchronization with other scheduling tools and usability as a forensic claims tool among many others.

Bridgit software looks more like an isolated human resources platform rather than a serious project planning tool as case studies are limited to a comparison against Microsoft Project and Excel.

Resource planning using named resources on jobs with thousands of activities and hundreds of resources is too granular.

Beware that there is no simple relationship between resource hours [effort] and resource quantity.  Staggering of activities, multiple activity and resource calendars on multiple shifts complicate the relationships. There is no single factor that will get all the correct quantities.  It is naïve to believe all job supervisors will attempt to do the math to figure out the resource quantities. I suspect this is the major source of frustration among the users of software like MS Project and P6 that cannot distinguish between effort and resource quantity.

I would not venture into it.