Collaborating with NetPoint to Schedule Pharmaceutical and Manufacturing Projects
June 05, 2023
Netpoint, Presentations
In this age of globalization, virtual meetings are the primary forum to discuss, plan and gather information. One crucial client requirement is to ensure the team can readily communicate on the project schedules. Learn how NetPoint functioned as the primary collaborative tool to schedule new sites, building expansions, and renovations for a cell and gene therapy contract development and manufacturing organization. For this program, PMA was tasked with developing fully integrated schedules from the shell schedules and presenting planning sessions to multiple clients. PMA schedulers integrated schedules from P6, Microsoft Project, and sometimes Excel into NetPoint to provide interactive schedules for the client and project team. NetPoint clearly identified the critical path and all near-critical activities to reveal the current status and health of the project schedule. NetPoint also validated the strategy implemented during the process validation phase and the other back-end activities.
Eduardo Nazario
Mr. Eduardo Nazario has extensive experience in capital planning, project management, and project controls for the pharmaceutical industry. He is a proven expert in preparing and updating construction schedules; planning, coordinating, and executing construction activities; supervising subcontractor work; and evaluating vendors and subcontractors. Mr. Nazario’s software knowledge includes NetPoint®, Primavera P6, Primavera Enterprise (P3e), Primavera Project Planner (P3), PrimeContract, and Microsoft Project.
You usually want to do a risk assessment for sampling pharma, including that as a grade review prior to the approval of the first capital request. After that, we want to do one prior to the actual construction, doing a scale reassessment after scope changes have been made.
Not commonly, but we have mostly used it in the commissioning and qualification schedules. This helps identify the resource requirements to execute all protocols. You want to able to disperse those protocols’ approval and the resource loading will allow you to do that.
If you already have your master schedule in NetPoint, then you can easily identify the tool for the four weeks lookahead option. Also, if you have a PC schedule or Microsoft Project, it is easily used to look ahead and create a different canvas. I like to create the lookahead schedule into a different canvas so I can analyze while performing that scheduling. You can transfer all your P6 information into Excel and then into NetPoint.
Yes; for example, a schedule I was working on last year at the time to market had a date that we either needed to complete or improve. The use of NetPoint was the only way to present it to the VP and management team because they could visualize the opportunities we had to improve the schedule.
Yes, NetPoint allows you to do this.
NetPoint and NetRisk have the ability to collaborate . They are highly congruent software that allows the user to upload NetPoint schedules into NetRisk, then NetRisk will perform variations of that schedule model.
There are two types of schedule risk assessment. You can actually range all the different durations in the schedule, or you can actually range the risk. We let the client see what’s best for them, but the industry is moving from ranging many of the durations towards managing the float to provide more accurate forecasts.
Using NetPoint allows us to show the baseline, or the previous schedule, and our current schedule right on top of each other. It is easy to visualize the changes. You can use the visualizer in P6, but it is not as user-friendly as NetPoint. Our clients prefer to see the summary in NetPoint.
We tend to create a new canvas in NetPoint. The only difficult part is creating the initial schedule, but once you have it, the weekly modifications are done easily because creating the actual schedule is easy to do. We create an independent schedule in NetPoint and modify it monthly.
The most difficult thing to do in NetPoint is to show all the details that are required in just one or two pages. We want to capture everything, but formatting the information to be easy to follow is the most difficult thing for NetPoint.