MOCA Systems Inc. (MSI) has announced important enhancements to Touchplan, the leading digital production planning platform, enabling easy synchronization with Oracle’s project management and scheduling system, Primavera P6. The powerful union of technologies eliminates the problem of schedule drift, where the P6 master schedule in the back office becomes out of sync with live workflow events in the field, resulting in increased budget and schedule risks for large, complex construction projects.
P6, based on the Critical Path Method (CPM), is time oriented. It provides master planners with a broad, top-down project view, identifying the longest path of dependent activities (critical path) that determine the shortest possible project duration. The P6 contractual schedule is periodically updated to reflect the actual sequencing and duration of workflow tasks in the production plan.
Touchplan, based on the Last Planner System (LPS), is action oriented. It provides production managers and executives with a detailed, bottom-up project view, enabling worker collaboration, commitment, and reliability through daily and weekly plan iteration. The Touchplan production plan is updated as necessary to reflect new and changed contractual requirements, supply chain deliveries, and labor availability dictated by the master schedule.
These systems have different jobs to do, but they work best when they can work together to keep the jobsite workflow and the contract schedule continuously synchronized. But the systems have different logic, data formats and end-users, making automated integration problematic. The latest enhancements to Touchplan provide a novel solution to this problem.
“Some planning software vendors have attempted to automate data and logic translation between the CPM system and LPS tools, resulting in a dissatisfying loss of control and autonomy for the users of both systems,” said Brett Adamczyk, MSI’s software division chief, adding “by contrast, with Touchplan we took a different, human-in-the-loop approach to keep experienced CPM and LPS experts in control of data selection and logic translation, while eliminating the drudgery of manually reformatting data and moving it between systems.”
The new Touchplan features have been used successfully by a panel of experienced P6 and Touchplan users who have collaborated with the Touchplan engineering team to develop the most effective way to unify the systems. With this process now complete, the ability to easily synchronize Touchplan with P6 is now available for all Touchplan users.
One of the inaugural users of the new capabilities is Utah-based Jacobsen Construction, a long-time P6 and Touchplan customer. According to Layne Hess, Corporate Director of Scheduling and Planning, “Combining the systems in this way is a boon to our planning productivity. It lets our experts spend more time managing project complexity, and less time managing project data.”
The new Touchplan features are available at no additional cost to current and new Touchplan customers, and MSI’s Touchplan Customer Success team is ready to help them implement Touchplan- P6 synchronization to meet their individual needs.
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