These ?back-end? or ?back-office? systems concentrate on cost control. Certainly turning estimates into budgets into committed costs and measuring actual against committed costs is an important activity. Management needs this after-the-fact information to ensure that future projects in their construction scheduling software are planned and executed properly.

The difficulty with these approaches, however, is that they don't recognize the motto ?time is money.? These approaches do not provide top management with the tools they need to make decisions on a daily, weekly and month-to-date basis to make sure that a project and profit are on track.

Integrating the ?front-end? systems, such as critical path method scheduling and project management software, provides top management with these capabilities. Here's how:

- Field reports completed each night include what activities were accomplished as percent completed or by units put in place, whether measured by labor hours or materials or both. Done nightly, most field reports for the construction scheduling software can be completed in 15 minutes.

- The field report is captured electronically and sent to a central information server. There, the field information can be compared with the schedule and an analysis of variances completed during nightly processing. These variances can be broken into two major areas: alerts and schedule modification.

ALERTS

Activity-related alerts in the scheduling software include: critical tasks that have passed their start date; those that have started, but are significantly behind schedule; those that have started and are significantly ahead of schedule; and those that have not started, but have time to be completed before the late finish date.

Document-related alerts include those documents with manually set resolution dates that have passed and those documents that are related to an activity and are not resolved seven days or more ahead of the activity-start date.

SCHEDULE MODIFICATION

Recalculation if the construction scheduling software will indicate if the contract end date remains valid, needs to be adjusted or if changes in working hours and manpower are necessary.

With this information in the construction scheduling software, management can take action much earlier. For example, if a critical path activity, which is behind schedule, is not addressed quickly it causes the contract end date to be extended. When this happens, the contractor must either apply additional manpower later in the project to stay on track, face excessive general conditions or possible liquidated damages or an unhappy owner. All of these negatively affect the contractor's bottom line.

Integrated software also can remind management when the initiation of an activity is related to document approval, such as a permit. If this activity has little or no float (lies near or on the critical path), it is imperative to get the permit quickly. If this item slips through the crack, again the results are a reduction of the contractor's profit margin.

Construction scheduling software that constantly collects field information, compares it with planned activity and alerts management of the variances allows contractors more time to analyze alternatives and make better decisions. Better decisions result in a higher probability of meeting or exceeding planned completion dates and profit margins.