The schedule companion.
ploteer reads the schedule and turns it into a picture the whole project can read, a history that can be questioned, and evidence that can be put on the table. It makes the planner’s effort visible, brings the schedule to life, and translates it into smart outputs, so that everyone can take part in the planning.
ploteer was built by a planner with twenty years at every level and in every chair of construction projects. The challenges inside the planning practice itself, and the limits of sharing the schedule data with the rest of the team, in engineering, procurement, construction, contracting and project management, are all known and all lived. Now ploteer is the answer to them.
A companion, not a replacement
Scheduling software has done the math for decades. The process is proven, and it keeps evolving. ploteer leaves the planner’s schedule, sequence and process as they are, and stands next to the planner as a companion to see, review, analyze, understand and report them.
Visualize it, simplify it
A schedule is as complex as software code. The scope elements hold relationships between them, and every change of conditions changes those too. It grows with every detail put in and every degree of precision expected, until it takes pages to print and hours to digest. ploteer turns that data into visuals and smart outputs, and simplifies it as far as our users want.
Outputs, ready to use
A schedule holds hundreds of data points to compare, recalculate and link to other sources. With the traditional methods they do not come out ready: two or more other programs, hours to days. ploteer gives them ready, in the app, in one or a few clicks. Our users spend their time on the result, not on preparing it.
AI, for the user’s good
Artificial intelligence is a phenomenon, and the limit of its potential is high. ploteer takes its help, guides it through our users’ needs, and puts it to work on their problems. It reads, it drafts, it explains; the planner decides what is true.
That is all.
Kept up to date
Technology evolves, and so does our curiosity for better ways and new techniques. Inside ploteer, improvement runs day by day. In planning a schedule has to stay live, and so does the product: a live machine, working for our users and evolving with them.
Secure, as if it were ours
A schedule is one of the most valuable documents a project owns, and we know it. Every client has its own database, hosted in the EU, reached through the client’s own link, with the editors and the viewers of the client’s choosing. The client’s data is kept the way we keep our own.
To planners, and to everyone who reads the schedules.
What we see
We have built structures for thousands of years, and every one of them needed a plan. The plans of today are more complex than any before them. The profession calls this plan the schedule, or the programme, and it is the document that helps a project to completion: safely, to the standards, on time and within budget. It starts as a simple sequence and, multiplied by the buildings, the areas and the disciplines, becomes dozens of pages that everyone on the project has a question about, from the sponsor to the subcontractor.
The scheduling tools of our profession have carried it for decades. They calculate the network correctly, they hold the schedule the contract refers to, and they will go on doing so. Their design, however, belongs to an earlier generation of software, and the cost of that is paid by the planner. The schedule fits no page and no meeting. Relationships run as vertical lines through thousands of rows, and where a date comes from is close to impossible to trace by eye. The tool computes the dates but says nothing about them: whether a milestone is slipping, since when and what drives it is found by hand, update after update. Presenting the result takes a second and a third program. Under that load the schedule is read by fewer people, and the planner’s effort goes unseen.
Where we help
ploteer is a web application, fast and reachable at any time, with the planner’s repeating work built in as commands: one click, and the comparison, the critical path, the curves or the report are ready. It reports back: when a date moves, what moved, what drove it, and a first draft of the explanation. It puts the schedule on one page the whole project can read, and it shows what changed between two updates without a spreadsheet to find it in.
Not only the planner, but the whole team now connects to the schedule. On the planner’s side, ploteer gives full speed: the update read, compared and explained in seconds. The construction manager gets the schedule drawn on the site layout, and judges the site against the progress on it. The contract manager gets the comparison at once, when a contractor is selected, when the contract is signed, and when a claim or an extension of time is reviewed. The engineering and procurement leads see whether their deliveries still hold the dates the site needs. The client’s representative reads the contractor’s schedule the same way, update after update. And when the project manager presents to the board, the visuals and the reports are already there.
ploteer
Project Dynamics B.V. · The Netherlands