Schedule Schemes Managed From a Library

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I'm working with a spec/production builder looking to build 550 housing units this year.

We've created a fair template and are looking at tighter integration with the purchasing/estimating department.

The current behaviour of Interactive Schedules is painfully inadequate as there is no way to manage individual schemes outside of a single project file.

The workaround to this lack of manageability is to construct an "estimating garage", a black box to hotlink projects into and then produce reports. This is only a short term solution because while we can configure and fine tune the interactive schedules themselves, they lose their capacity for interaction because of the hotlinking.

I have found no way to create, revise and manage schedules for deployment across the enterprise. In an architectural practice where one-off design is the norm, I would find this problematic: in an enterprise with an inventory of 75+ standard plans for single family and multi family houses used in the construction of 500+ buildings a year, it's downright unworkable.

If schedules behaved like library parts and were managed and deployed from a collection of schedules, life would be a lot better.

[Barry Kelly]

Don't forget you can import and export schedules from your scheme settings dialogue.
Not much of a better option than your hotlinking as it doesn't update existing schedules but simply creates a new one so you will need to re-link them in the layouts.
It would be nice to have a central source that when updated would apply to all jobs.
Barry.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Barry, I've been trying to do this, but I've:

a) been sloppy about version control (my fault)
b) looking for consistent behaviour across 75 different, but related buildings is nasty.

I will try and be more consistent in teh way I name schemes and keep them organized for importing and re-importing.

I note here, too that a new version of an old scheme is not overwritten, but rather renamed, retaining both the old and new.