I manage the manufacturing for a small curtainwall company (custom, high end unitized window framing for buildings). Our major bottleneck is engineering and a big part of their issue is they don't manage their resources (engineer/cad hours) very well at all.
Is there a software solution you'd recommend for engineering resource planning? Keep in mind that we're a job shop with each new building we get the successful bid on. Each building project typically has several phases for various window systems we are applying. And we typcically have 15 or so building projects (in various stages of completion) going an at any given time. A given building project will usually run a year to a year and a half in duration. So, what I'd like to do is find some engineering resource planning software that is easy to use and always applying our engineering/cad hours across all of the jobs/phases.
I'd sure appreciate any advice/recommendations. Thanks.
OK, multiple projects using the same resources. You can do this with Project if you don't mind having one big file to keep track of everything. It's not the cleanest solution for project management, but it's definitely affordable. My current company/location uses it for their engineering jobs.
Primavera is the Cadillac. You can set up different projects that all share the same resources and have them balance out amongst several different projects. It's a powerful program, which means its got a steeper learning curve and it costs more too. When we plan major unit outages or projects, we use Primavera to schedule everything.
I think a lot of the contractors we work with utilize Primavera. Of course, my company is dealing with big-time design firms where they need the power and capability of Primavera. Not sure it's worth it for a smaller company to deal with, as I think there are some IT issues with servers that are needed in order to make Primavera work correctly.