Trac2 Scheduling Program

Build a full critical path construction schedule — a house, a warehouse,

an office fit-out, or a twenty-four storey tower.

Every scheduling program starts you at an empty grid, and this one does

too. Insert your own tasks, indent them, link them, set constraints, and

schedule anything with tasks, durations and an order they happen in: a

renovation, a tenant improvement, a subdivision.

It just isn't the only way in.

IT WRITES THE SCHEDULE FOR YOU

Pick the structure type, the building use, the sitework and the number of

levels. The program writes the rest — and the questions change to suit the

building. A wood frame house isn't asked about window curbs, because a

framed wall doesn't have one. A wood frame job doesn't get a tower crane.

 Single family house      Wood frame

 Low rise apartment       Wood frame, mid rise

 Warehouse / industrial     Tilt-up concrete

 Office building        Structural steel

 Condo / apartment tower    Concrete, cast in place

One to 60 storeys. Crawl space, slab on grade or full basement. Up to 8

underground parking levels. Open cut, shored, or deep excavation.

The generator is a head start on the buildings it knows — not a limit on

what you can schedule.

WHAT IT ALREADY KNOWS

This is the part that is hard to buy. On a concrete tower, every one of

these is wired in as real logic, not a note on a bar:

• The floor to floor cycle, with the fly tables stripped off one floor

 and flown up to form the floor above

• Window curbs following the fly form removal — and releasing the

 finishing trades behind them

• Transfer slabs over a high ground floor, and the relocated tower

 column starters that go with them

• Tower crane erected during the footing pour, on a pad that gets poured

• Man and material hoist, and when the crane can come down

• Hoistway doors one per landing — often the real driver on a tower

The same depth is in the smaller buildings. It just has less to say about

a house, because a house has less going on.

SCHEDULING

• Full CPM, forward and backward pass

• Critical path with a near-critical slack threshold, and multiple

 critical paths

• Task path highlighting — select any task and see what drives it and

 what it drives, both directions, in one click

• Working HOURS per day, not just working days, so a half day task means

 half of an actual shift

• Half day Saturdays handled as a shorter window

• 15 regional holiday calendars, Canada and the United States, with the

 weekend rules and Christmas shutdown handled

• Manual or automatic scheduling per task, progress and percent complete

• Detail levels — issue 100 rows instead of 1,000

IT IS YOUR SCHEDULE, NOT MINE

Every judgement call about how a team runs a floor is a field on the title

page, not a number buried in the code. Change one and the whole building

re-sequences.

WHERE THE NUMBERS CAME FROM

Some of these blocks were measured off real job files. Some were built

from published practice. They are not the same thing, and the program says

which is which — in the dropdown, while you are choosing. Where a block is

published practice, your own numbers beat mine.

HOW IT RUNS

• One HTML file. It opens in any browser.

• No installation, no account, no subscription.

• Works with no internet — which matters in a site trailer.

• One file per job. Save it, email it, open it anywhere.

• Autosave with recovery if the program closes with work open.

• Export to CSV, or print with the title block.

NEW IN THIS VERSION - ISSUING IT Press Issue Copy and it writes a separate file. That file is what the trades get, and there is no editing in it. Not a locked grid - no grid to lock. The dates are plain text and the only button on it is Print, which is also how a sub makes his own PDF. Across the top it states the two things he opened it to find: the completion date now, and the days lost against the baseline. At the bottom, every delay you entered with the reason you typed - "rain, no pour Tuesday" - beside the date it moved. A new date on its own starts an argument in the trailer. The reason ends it. And six months later, when somebody wants to know how the job ended up where it did, the record is already written. You don't go looking for it.

Concrete and formwork takeoff feeding a full CSI estimate, in one tool —

the TRAC2 Estimating Suite. Same idea, same one-file approach, built from

the same 55 years. See it at trac2.ca

Brian Gillett — 55 years in high-rise concrete.

Questions: trac2.mgmt@gmail.com