MONITOR - Overview

DRAFT ONLY

MONITOR - General Overview

MONITOR has been designed to provide an integrated database of the financial and operations non-textual information encountered in the management of a construction operation.

It is designed to include resource information from the initiation of an estimate through project close-out.

The system deals with primarily with resources and then their monitary equivalents. Thus, where practical, the quantity of a resource utilized is retained through all processing as long as the information has some meaning.

Estimating & Project Planning

Makes use of template estimates or modules of estimates to create new estimates.
Allows the user to incorporate the resource utilization history from actual projects into estimates so as to provide the ability to "reprice" a project using current resource prices.
Makes use of resource tables and resource group tables to provide user definable pricing for individual elements of material, labour or equipment cost or crews or equipment spreads.
Uses precedence network scheduling to provide time-scale to the project plan.
Uses a unique resource levelling algorithm to provide a resource based "float" calculation.
A modular design allows the user to plug-in various planning schemes to model project alternatives.

Procurement, Orders and Changes

The system, as a central philosophy, sees costs developing as a result of committments made by the corporation and following those committments through the process of usage and payment. For this reason, an "Order" from a customer or to a vendor is key to recognizing cost and revenue.
Furthermore, we have assumed that any order can be broken down into "sub-orders" and either the orders or sub-orders can be changed. The documentation of the Procurement system deals with this in more detail.

General Features

It is designed to operate in a multi-currency environment such that a single project can incorporate suppliers from different countries with the user maintaining project records in a "home" currency while retaining the ability to report in the currency of a customer.
To retain flexibility, MONITOR permits the user to financially recognize transactions at various points in the procurement cycle - and do this on a vendor order basis.