The Naval Shipyards had a very robust but old scheduling system that used a proprietary commercial scheduling engine and a government-written operator interface. This greatly limited their ability to update either piece of the process and left them with an antiquated system that required uniquely trained schedulers to access the application, use static, non-interactive graphics, limited the ability to conduct real-time updates, and used a legacy coding that was difficult to modify or maintain. The Navy entered into an Other Transactional Authority contracting process through the Information Warfare Research Project Consortium to competitively select a product that could support the Navy’s needs. This process requested proposals (white papers) funded demonstration projects and a funded final selection process of the two most capable demonstration projects. Herdt Consulting won the final selection utilizing the Concerto Software of Realization Technologies. The commercial off the shelf software used at other enterprises required some modifications to support the Naval Shipyard processes and data architecture. Testing was conducted on a customized solution in a government facility and rolled out in two waves to each activity to allow familiarization and reduce risk to critical projects. The new software has met all existing requirements while providing greatly broadened access to project managers and engineers. Managers now make their own what-if changes to the project, update existing work, and integrate new work prior to submission to a scheduler for integration into the master network. This has taken the number of personnel directly involved in project schedule management from 20-50 to 400 or more at each activity. The software provides state of the art graphics allowing direct manipulation of constraints on drawings. The software is very intuitive allowing laymen to create complex where statements using a Boolean logic editor. Data is easily exported and imported through CSV and XLS files to allow integration with other contracted activities. The new software maintains many versions of the project each day to allow users to roll back in time to see how changes affected the network and assist projects early in planning to see original networks and the progression of work.
Concerto Implementation at the Naval Shipyards
