Typical document control problems as they relate to earned value are basic. It’s hard to measure your earned value for documents that are deliverables. It’s hard to translate that into getting paid sooner.

The root of the problem here is, you’re doing all this work and you’re not getting paid for it in a timely manner. Why is that? It’s hard to measure and report on document progress.

We talk to prospects all the time and they’re telling us that documents often reside in separate systems. It is hard to aggregate all of the progress on the different documents when they’re in different systems. Additionally, these documents are often in uncontrolled environments. This is code for residing in folder structures or just floating around email inboxes or in a system that doesn’t really manage revision or revision purpose.

We’re also hearing that it’s often unclear which revision is the latest approved revision. That’s just endemic of using spreadsheets and sub-par document management applications and folder structures. We’re also hearing that email and spreadsheets aren’t effective. We see this all the time. Passing documents back and forth via email and managing it in spreadsheets, there’s really no control there. Spreadsheets as project management tools breakdown quickly and without fail. We’re also hearing that most document management systems don’t even think about the cost element. They don’t think about earned value and tying that back to your project cost.

Let’s take a look at what ProjecTools does to solve these problems. ProjecTools is the best solution for earned value and document management, because we get all of your project documents into a single controlled environment. More than that you can get all of your project documents, or all of your projects, in a single controlled environment. ProjecTools will enforce and automate all the workflows to process project documents. We’ll address that a little bit later and how that ties into the earned value.

The application natively integrates the ProjecTools cost control which is a unique element of the tool. Something that other document management systems simply don’t think to or are incapable to address. We have addressed the earned value aspect of engineering and other project documents because our business and application has deep roots in the oil and gas and EPC industries – which structure cash flows on earned progress.

The first thing I mentioned before was all the project documents are a single application. ProjecTools is cloud-based so users have on demand access to what they need. More than that contributors, so your engineers, clients, and subs can be anywhere in the world. Whether your project teams are in Korea, Aberdeen, or at home for the day – it doesn’t matter. They can still contribute to the project document register from anywhere in the world. The central repository gathers up all the documents from all the different players in the one system and uses role-based permissions to dole out responsibility without sacrificing security.

The send thing I mentioned was optimize oil and gas workflow. In ProjecTools you can enforce the workflow you’re already using. You can automate this optimized workflow that has made you guys a successful company to this point, and basically just configure the application to reflect what you are already doing. It will automate all of the management portion of it. Which minimizes your document control effort, and eliminates a lot of the human error. That last point is that ProjecTools lets you use your workflow to determine earned value for a document or set of documents.

We understand that you’re already doing the work already. You’re already running your documents through workflows, reviews and approvals, revisions, assigning revision purposes. With a couple minutes of setup in ProjecTools you can use your task metadata and your revision control metadata to link to your cost control and determine your earn value, so you guys can get paid quicker for the work that you’re already doing.

A big part of this is eliminating revision confusion. ProjecTools does this with revision workflows. You can standardize your revision purposes. You can tell the application that released revisions need to have a revision purpose in ProjecTools. What we recommend is, using that revision purpose disposition. If you feed it for review, issued for review and approval, as built, etc. That tying to your earned valued. That being your milestone for payday. When you do that you can really tighten up the loop between cost and document control.

There are some other features in here that eliminate revision confusion that don’t so much tie to earned value, so I won’t mention them here. There’s a document distribution matrix. Which basically serves up all of your documents to your engineers, and suppliers, and clients in a really easy to navigate register. It will always show in the latest revision. The workflow is such that you can even download a superseded revision. If you view one it has a nice watermark over it.

ProjecTools natively integrates with cost control. We’ve kind of danced around this a little but we’ll talk about it a little bit more. In ProjecTools, document controllers, or engineers, can define work packages. They can group document and work documents into work packages. Once they’ve done that they can link these packages to milestone chains. They can use the revision purpose to tie to your percent complete per document or work package. Then you link these work packages to your WBS. As your documents progress it will trigger progress in your document area in your cost control module. Additionally you can report on document progress your percent complete. You can always run reports in your document control module that will reflect the earned value and the progress that you see in your cost control module. You can really corroborate what your billing to your clients. You can report on your progress from a cost perspective as well as from a document progress engineering perspective, and they’ll both tie together.