It’s a law of project management that the longer a project remains in a shop, the more it costs to get it out the door. The less time a project stays in the shop the less opportunity for costs to add up.

The central premise of Activplan is that cutting lead time—or more accurately customer wait time—is the key to performance improvement. The objective is to eliminate delays in the overall business process from "quotes to cash" that prevent a company from serving customers faster. Shorter lead times will increase sales, reduce costs, accelerate cash flow, and increase effective capacity all at the same time.

Activplan planning systems are designed specifically for project oriented organizations: ETO (Engineer-To-Order), MTO (Make-To-Order) as well as project management and engineering firms. Most of the available manufacturing planning MRP (Material Requirements Planning) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software applications are directed toward mass production organizations.

The Activplan software modules manage the critical functions: estimating, project management, actual costing and engineering change control, thus enabling clients to answer the following challenges:

•   How to use past project history to create fast accurate cost estimates to secure future business and plan new work.

•   How to estimate quickly and accurately a new, “never built one of those before”, one-off-items or modified previously built items.

•   How to, after project approval, shorten the order processing cycle,  especially scheduling, capacity planning, and material procurement, thus shortening the project’s lead time. 

•   How to utilize staff and facility resources more efficiently, thus shortening the project’s lead time.

•   How to improve cash flow through faster project time and cost tracking and therefore faster invoicing.

•   How to streamline business processes and increase profits and  the value of your business by sharing the knowledge of a very few people with more people in the company. Accessing knowledge, previously locked away in a few key employees’ minds permits new staff to contribute more quickly to the success of the business.

•   How to fully utilize your company’s biggest asset, the information that it can use over and over again to secure future business and contribute to its success.