Integrated Schedule
Integrate Project Cost & Schedule with Contruent Enterprise
With Contruent Enterprise, create a schedule, import P6 or MS Project Schedule, and track activities and resources. Seamlessly integrate schedules with control accounts, engineering accounts, purchase orders, RFPs, contracts, and progress accounts. By integrating cost and schedules together, users can roll up and categorize relevant project metrics; utilize flexible cost spreading based on project function; show an auditable and time-phased decision process; track budgets, changes and trends; manage contingency; and forecast future expenditures and financial trends.
Solution capabilities
Accelerate period close with accurate reporting
Improve management and accuracy of change orders
Lower project risk through reduced exposure to claims
Benefits
- Form the basis for calculating Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, which provide the project performance status for cost and schedule
- Make maintenance of the schedule simpler by allowing it to focus on sequence and timing of project execution
- Address changes to budgets and forecasts, while changes to the schedule are being considered
- Manage performance of multiple budgets, including approved and control budgets
- Address the issue of time-phasing contingency as well as how indirect costs are time-phased
- Record purchase order and contract committed costs from the financial systems
- Apply different expenditure curves for different time-phased budgets and forecast
Time-Phased Budget vs Cost Loaded Schedule
Scheduling tools are not designed to effectively manage schedule, estimates and budgets at the granularity that complex megaprojects require. Instead of cost-loading schedules, a time-phased budget enables the planning and tracking of the costs over time through a common control record. Rather than individually assigning each estimated cost to specific activities, the “control account” allows for the roll-up of multiple activities and their associated costs to a single record.
A Time-Phased Budget indicates the planned expenditure of budget over time. It begins with an estimate and a schedule, but instead of incorporating one within the other, it uses control accounts to link them together. Contruent Enterprise utilizes those control accounts to generate a performance measurement baseline.
Time to perform tasks has reduced by almost 90 percent by using Contruent. This has helped me spend more time on in-depth analysis of current project performance, providing controlling measures to ensure that the project performs as planned.
Benefits of a Time-Phased Budget vs Cost-Loaded Schedule
All megaprojects face the same challenge: how do you accurately predict and report on the success of the project and still have time to actually manage it? The answer is by creating a Performance Measurement Baseline to plan, track, and report project progress against.
A PMB establishes project spend (Estimate) across the duration of a project (Schedule) and establishes baseline dates and costs, creating a cost flow, also referred to as Planned Value (PV) or Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled (BCWS). Contruent Enterprise, a powerful capital project management software, automates the creation of a Time-Phased Budget in order to simplify the process of creating a PMB.
