Press Release (Germany, Bönnigheim / Stuttgart, 4 June, 2009)
The 10th generation of the flexible and easy to use Project Management Solution, A-Plan 2009, is now also available in English. Over 12,000 companies and institutions are already using the project and resource planning A-Plan.
The customers of braintool software gmbh (www.braintool.com), Bönnigheim, near Stuttgart, still come mostly from German speaking countries. ”Actually many of our customers are working in distributed projects together with foreign companies or have a subsidiary company abroad” confirmed Annegret Herrmann, Director of braintool software gmbh. “These customers particularly appreciate the possibility for users to plan their projects collaboratively, sharing a central database. Hereby, with our international-oriented customers the number of users increases continuously, counting on an English version of A-Plan“ added Herrmann.
A-Plan around the world (source flickr.com)
And it seems that word-of-mouth advertising also works well abroad. Although no specific marketing action has been carried out in foreign markets yet, the number of users abroad is increasing steadily. In addition to the already heavily representative markets of Switzerland and Austria, now there are users of the Swabian Project Management Software in the USA, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East among others. As an inexpensive alternative to complex programs, like MS Project, A-Plan conquers new followers around the world for easy and comfortable project management.
World-wide, the central point for company’s business success is project planning and control, but unfortunately it is still frequently left out. Often office applications, like Excel, are misused as a planning tool. They can still work to start a project or to provide a first rough overview. But just once the project plan needs initial changes, self-solutions quickly comes to their limits. Amendments are no longer sustained and project participants’ benefits for a fast approaching zero. Who works on which work package? Which is the status in each task? What still must be completed to achieve the next milestone? Where goes my critical path? When can we conclude the project? Key information remains on the track and it lacks the necessary transparency. The consequences are projects that have times and costs out of control.
„Clarity, easy handling and also fulfilling of professional requirements simultaneously in plan and control of projects, are the conditions for a planning tool to reach the long term success.“ as the author of A-Plan and current software development manager Bernhard Reichl know. „80 percent of the wide functions that A-Plan 2009 offers today were implemented based on customer requirements. Thus, this is a very practical solution from project managers to project managers being developed during the last years.“ Reichl added.
A-Plan represents clearly the project tasks’ chronology in a Gantt diagram. The calendar resolution can be adjusted from an annual overview up to minute intervals. Tasks can be arbitrary split into sub-items and shown or hidden along a tree structure. By the allocation of resources such as employees, equipment, machinery or rooms, the availability can be estimated and the utilized and remaining capacity can be known. For this purpose, A-Plan offers a special view from each resource where the individual operations and absences are displayed in bar diagrams.
A-Plan consciously avoids providing most part of automatisms in order to optimize the project scheduling. Of course during the project, problems and anomalies are reported to the person responsible – if the duration of the processes is eventually extended or the resources must be increased in number or in efficiency, the responsibility remains in planners. A-Plan supports him by a multiple auxiliary’s calculation functions.
The variance analysis opposes the planning to the real project status. At a glance you know the divergences from the original plan to reality and thus gain valuable knowledge for future projects. The real accrued time can be entered directly in A-Plan or read by an automated interface from the recorded time worked. Through the prognosis technique in A-Plan 2009, now time and cost-related calculations for the future can also be made.
Optimal and efficient information about ingenious print settings as well as Excel reports, with customized report presentations are facilitated to the most ambitious stakeholders.
Customers now have the possibility of A-Plan 2009 also in an English version. For those interested, there is a free full functional evaluation version available.