[harryn]

Hi, I have been asked to help a small company market an "Add On" feature for MS Project. MS Project only goes down to approximately minutes of time increments, and this "Add - On" allows the scheduling to go to much smaller time increments, such as seconds, sub seconds, etc.

They envision this as being very useful for people that do production planning type work where seconds and smaller make a difference. An example would be optimizing programming on high speed equipment for operations that can be done in parallel or have to meet up in certain time windows. The product was actually developed originally at the request of a large machine shop type operation.

Since MS Project also allows setting up the "person or item" doing the work, as well as pricing per time and item, this could in theory be used to do cost planning. There is an ability to track "actual" vs "plan" as well built into MS Project.

The target pricing is around $ 400 / seat, although I can certainly get some beta copies to people for much cheaper. Availability is planned for mid summer 2010.

Questions:

a) Do shops use MS Project for things like this now, or something else?

b) Does this makes sense to use as a planning tool for a machine shop / foundry kind of operation?

c) Any suggestions on other types of applications?

Thanks

Harry

[harryn]

Hi,

Just a bit more info for anyone interested.

This is the company (The product is close to release to alpha customers / testers).

www.ranateckk.com

The add-on allows MS Project to deal with time slices down to the millisecond stage vs more like minutes.

Example Application:
- Plug the times for each step of a cnc into the software
- Put in times + costs
- Track material flow through a shop to make a part (part runner paperwork, but electronically)

It could tell you how long it takes to make the part, to a run of them, costs, and track the multiple steps through your shop.

This is intended for engineering level use and does not require MS Project Server to run.

Other potential applications:
- plan a heart surgery down to very fine time increments
- re-stocking planning

Integration with Visio is possible as well.

Take care,

Harry