In-Depth: Looking at AEC Software-FastTrack Schedule 10

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A major new improvement in FastTrack Schedule 10 is the complete overall of the Work Calendars functionality. Ryan Kish said that this overhaul was necessary to accomplish the large-scale improvements users were asking for. New are new Base Calendars and Work Calendars. You can define calendars per resource, tasks and dependencies and can utilize an unlimited number of calendars per project. Base calendars can be things like the company or project calendar and can drive specific project, sub-project or tasks calendars.

AEC Software has always used templates to help individuals to get started but now the company has taken this further by including an online library of templates that AEC Software will continue to expand on. These are organized by industry categories and there is even a new “Green” category which contains a LEED for Homes schedule, organized and pre-populated with sample data. This would be useful to architects and builders managing green design or construction projects. (see image below)

04 - New Online Template Library features pre-structured template files organized by industry. A new "Green" industry category has a LEED for Homes schedule.

New in FastTrack Schedule 10 is Effort Driven Scheduling. With Effort Driven Scheduling you can compress scheduled tasks by adding more resources. Ryan Kish said that customers have the flexibility to set project tasks as either effort-driven or fixed duration in FastTrack Schedule 10. This automatically adjust task durations and overall schedule durations by adding or subtracting resources while keeping the total work for a task constant. Related to this is the new Assignment Contouring which allows you to choose from eight built-in contours that apply a specific amount of effort (per applied resource) over the period of a task. These include flat, bell-shaped, back-loaded, front-loaded, Turtle and others.

Other new features include Resource Usage Graphing at the bottom of Gantt charts, enhanced resource information forms, and Address Book import (Mac only). The program still provides excellent integration with Microsoft Project and Mind Manager. You can save schedules to multiple file formats and  one of the best features of FastTrack Schedule 10 is its Consolidation feature which enables multiple FastTrack Schedules to be merged into a single file.

Ryan Kish told us that AEC Software’s FastTrack Schedule has traditionally two types of users. “Fifty percent of our customers come from an experience with intense enterprise-class scheduling apps or MS Project. The other half are “new to project management software entirely.” Ryan also said with the Mac being more popular than ever these days FastTrack Schedule is helping users embrace cross-platform project management tools.

FastTrack Schedule has been reviewed here on Architosh several times in the past becuase we are aware of its usage by general contractors and architects or interior designers. However, besides architecture (and the reference in AEC Software’s name) FastTrack Schedule is used extensively in many industries, including but hardly limited to: Aerospace, Architecture, Automotive, Construction, Consulting, Defense and Military, Education, Energy, Engineering, Entertainment, Financial, Health, Government, Legal, Manufacturing, Marketing and Advertising, Non-Profit, Pharmaceutical, Publishing, Real Estate, Scientific and R&D, Software Development, Telecommunications and Transportation and Logistics.

Trial versions of FastTrack Schedule 10 are available online. The new product is 349.USD for a new single seat and 179.USD for an upgrade.

For more information on AEC Software’s FastTrack Schedule 10 visit here: www.aecsoftware.com