Discover how fast and easy project estimating, planning and scheduling can be accomplished.

Through ActivPlan’s years of consulting and training experience, providing services to project based manufacturing and engineering firms, we have identified and addressed 2 challenges:

1. How to use past project history to create faster and more accurate cost estimates in order to secure future business.

2. How to speed up the order processing cycle especially the steps involved in material rrequirements planning and material acquisition.

Esti-Plan is an innovative and affordable solution for project estimating and planning for the small to medium enterprise. It addresses the issues and challenges that project-oriented manufacturers (engineer-to-order and make-to-order), engineers and project managers have to contend with.

Esti-Plan is an integrated system beginning with project configuration and definition, time and cost estimating and risk analysis, job planning, cost and schedule tracking, material management, inventory control, purchasing and receiving.

Esti-Plan Features

1. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) displays projects in logical and manageable hierarchical levels
2. WBS shows component internal costs, rolled-up costs and start dates at a glance
3. Imports direct and indirect resource rates from a cost database
4. Imports material prices from a materials database
5. Detailed estimate reports
6. Time phased material requirements report
7. Project resource and material rolled-up costs
8. Cost risk analysis expressing an estimate at different levels of risk tolerance
9. Activity Based Costing
10. Create and store user-defined estimating formulas in a library for easy retrieval
11. Create parametric estimating formulas from past project data and store them in a library for easy retrieval
12. Create estimates using Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) for estimating activities exhibiting high levels of uncertainty
13. Reuse components, tasks, and their subcomponents and subtasks complete with their actual costs from a searchable database of past completed projects
14. Save templates or skeletons of WBS elements and sub-elements with their tasks, rresources, and bills of material in a library for quick retrieval and insertion into a new project
15. Changes to resource rates and material prices in a central database automatically update all estimates
16. A model solver that creates parametric estimating models complete with model evaluation and validation

Project Planning and Scheduling:

1. Export WBS and tasks to Microsoft Project creating Gantt charts along with their estimated work content, start dates and resource names
2. After resource leveling, task scheduling etc. import all task information including, baseline start and finish dates, and duration from Microsoft Project
3. During project completion, import actual start, finish, per cent completion and work performed for all tasks and summary tasks
4. Customer delivery schedule reporting
5. Material Requirements Planning reporting
6. Task start dates reporting
7. Create time based project/process plans with work center assignments
8. Create time based bills of material

Materials Planning:

1. Uses same hierarchical WBS organization to display multi-level bills of material
2. Materials master database
3. Inventory monitoring
4. Inventory valuation
5. Inventory usage and turnover
6. Automatic inventory adjustment for material receipts
7. Choice of assigning material to work-in-progress, charged to the project or to inventory

Purchasing and Receiving:

1. Generate purchase orders by selecting bill of material items
2. Parts receiving transactions automatically adjust inventory without separate entries
3. Order release transactions automatically adjust inventory without separate entries

Screen Shots

The information below displays a selection of screen shots which explain and show the main sections of the program. To see a full size PDF version, click on the image. For more information contact us.

Esti-Plan uses work breakdown structure (WBS) organization to configure the project into manageable elements. The WBS becomes the road map for estimating, planning, scheduling, cost and schedule tracking, material requirements planning, purchasing and receiving. The WBS reduces the possibility of overlooking resource intensive activities and high value materials, consequently leaving out major cost items and underestimating the project. Esti-Plan speeds up future estimating by storing WBS elements, their sub-elements with tasks and bills of material as templates.

Esti-Plan estimating spreadsheets are tools to accurately and quickly create estimates using 5 different methodologies stored in libraries for quick retrieval:

1. User-defined formulas defined by the estimator

2. Parametric formulas derived from past projects

3. Fixed costs

4. Range (PERT) estimates for a high level of uncertainty

5. Activity Based Costing.

Cost tracking is completely integrated with estimating so that actual costs can be used for estimating. In this way Esti-Plan enables you to use past project history to secure future business.

Esti-Plan uses parametric estimating, a powerful tool that can provide accurate project cost estimates in a fraction of the time and effort of traditional methods. The U.S. Department of Defense stated in the Parametric Estimating Handbook that parametric techniques are a credible cost estimating methodology that can provide quick, accurate and supportable contractor estimates, lower cost proposal processes, and more cost- effective estimating systems.

Enter materials once in a master database including price/unit, vendors, sizes, specifications and many other fields.

Select and insert materials from the master database, make a quantity entry directly or calculate it using embedded formulas and conversion factors. Then costs are automatically rolled-up into the WBS total cost. One time price/unit updates in the materials master database automatically change all prices throughout the WBS.

Cost estimating is not always an exact science; expressing a cost estimate in terms of a single value does not present the whole picture. The Esti-Plan risk analysis report generator calculates the expected cost risk mathematically, by using a technique based on Monte Carlo simulation.

This provides a frequency distribution of the risk of overrun/underrun for each WBS element and the information you need to decide on your bid price or cost depending on the anticipated degree of difficulty, process capabilities, competitive position, and risk tolerance.

Microsoft Project® is the tool of choice for many companies, not only for managing the project but also for communicating status with their customers. Without having to reenter the information, you can export all estimates, resource requirements, and start dates to MS Project.

You can import baseline information for creating project planning reports. For project follow-up you can import actual costs to date, on time schedule tracking and the estimated cost to complete to determine what is still needed to deliver the project on time.