Best choice for making Commissioning schedule_ Primavera P6 or MS Project-2010

Hi Girish

The main problem you face in the commissioning of power works is setting up the outage windows in the calendars - these are the periods of time when you can safely work in zones with the power off.

These are normally set in "Hours" but I have known some in "Minutes".

P6 does not have this subtelty in work patterns and I have no idea how MSP compares.

I know that Asta PowerProject will do it because I have used on such a project.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Mike,

Thanks for your reply, but as i told you that i have never worked on any software other than P6 & MSP-2010. If you can provide me any link for the Asta power software. I can try to download and work on it for monitoring purpose.

Thanks & Regards,

Girish Bhave

Hi Girish

Go to www.Astadev.com and get a 30 day free download.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Dear Mike,

I have been trying to download and install the programme but there is a problem in downloading. Can you recommend any other link for installing.

Thanks & Regards,

Girish Bhave

Hi Girish Bhave,

I see you registered for the free trial on Saturday so that part of it worked - you should have then been sent an email to the address you provided us (an ...@gmail.com address was entered).  The link to the download will be within that email.

You may wish to register again if you are unsure whether the address provided was correct.  The link is http://www.astadev.com/products/asta-powerproject/asta-powerproject-trial/

In any case, as your registration noted your country as Saudi Arabia, the details within that registration have been passed to our local partner in the region: www.cmcs.co.  You may also want to contact them directly if you want further assistance with Asta Powerproject.

Best wishes,

Ben @ Asta

Girish,

My choice would be Primavera.

It is more or less the industry standard for many types of work, and is probably the most flexible in terms of manipulating data and reporting.

Regards

Mark

Given no other option than to choose between MSP and Primavera I would choose Primavera.

If Asta can be an option then I would consider things Asta can do that Primavera cannot. Among others I would consider if good communication with external contractors is important. If it is, then I would go with Asta over these two as Asta provides a free viewer that will allow transparent schedule communication among many users, some of them might be users of MSP, the most widely used scheduling software in the world, others might be on P3, others on P6 and others on the more advanced scheduling software such as Spider Project and Aurora.

But Aurora is very expensive, not for everyone, excellent if you need a customized application. My choice is Spider Project as lower level scheduling software cannot handle well shift work, cannot handle teams of meeting resources and non-meeting resources on the same activity, cannot model resource production rates and cannot even model the impact of assigning variable resource quantities among many other limitations, mostly stuck on functionality of CPM of the 70's. 

If you opt for P6 consider using a database engine capable of handling multiple databases.

http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/P6_Databases_Level_1.pdf