Revolutionary Planning Tool Unveiled at Key US Event
Bristol, UK, Wednesday 24th October, 2006
A more efficient business-planning tool as been unveiled at a major conference in the United States. This radical new software promises to transform the abilities of aerospace and defence contractors.
UK-based Acsian Limited have developed the tool, named Plexus, to energise the entire planning process. Enormous project complexity in major aerospace and defence programmes means inevitable risk of time and cost over-runs.
“Plexus not only deals with massive programme complexity but also implements good planning practices while automating the creation of optimised and re-optimised integrated project schedules,” says Ian Poccachard, product director of Acsian.
“The use of Plexus compresses project planning cycles, increases project efficiency and eliminates duplicated project administration and bureaucracy. Crucially Plexus reduces risk, staying consistent with project quality frameworks while enhancing product maturity and utilising business resources much more effectively.”
Acsian presented Plexus at the eight international Boeing DSM (dependency structure matrix) conference in Seattle in late October.
Although Acsian’s invention is particularly suited to risk, technologically complex aerospace and defence projects, Plexus will benefit any business sector where teams of experts collaborate on complex design processes, trade-off between cost, time and risk, and need fast, effective planning.
At the DSM conference Dr Rob Smith, consulting scientist for Acsian Limited, explained how Plexus builds and maintains schedule-independent project logic models, distributes their creation, reuses project logic and provides a systematic methodology. By applying a radical algorithm to produce schedules, Plexus produces plans that perform valuable task iterations and avoiding unnecessary iterations, while trading-off time, cost and refinement risk. Plexus also works alongside existing planning systems in use in the aerospace and defence industry.