Monday, October 10, 2022

UniPhi 18 Release - Set Your Calendars


UniPhi 18 is set to be released on 31st October 2022. This release has been a little longer in the making but is packed full of enhancements to enable our end users to get even more out of our software. The focus of this release is around four themes: Commercial Management, Project Controls, Resource Planning, Client Side Project Management and User Experience.

Commercial Management

The last 12 months has seen a massive uptake of UniPhi by construction engineering consultants to assist them in managing major project commercials. Usually this is centred around joint venture  management where UniPhi automates and provides transparency for JV charge in and charge out invoices. Our 'n' level WBS capability and alignment of timesheets to this allows project commercial managers to get the detail they need to provide transparency on invoices to JV partners and the JV client.

In addition to this, commercial managers can easily use the resource planning features to update estimates to complete and thereby estimates at completion. These time-savings on the above tasks is astronomical with proven reductions on some programs saving JV partners over $1m per year.

The enhancements in this area include:

  • Resource charge and cost rate history per project rather than deployment wide
  • A host of claim time changes to allow for flexible rates management on invoicing
  • New timesheet administrator license
  • Non-working days calendar
  • Deployment specific contractual rules interface
  • Edit certified hours of a claim
  • Portfolio schedule import
  • Program time and material contracts being read from portfolio of projects\
  • More and more copy paste from excel (e.g. resource rates, contract schedules and variations)

Project Controls

Earned value metrics across the program

UniPhi is currently supporting design teams on major infrastructure projects totalling more than $1bn. Some of the projects we're providing project controls features for the design team include:

  • Sydney Metro
  • Melbourne Metro
  • Warringah Freeway
  • Inland Rail
  • Easing Sydney Congestion Phase 1,2 and 3

UniPhi 18 contains a host of new features to support earned value tracking including: 

  • 'n' level  WBS in our contracts module
  • Expanded P6 integration to include % complete per mapped task
  • Month end snapshot of data system wide. 
  • Manage standard tasks for time sheeting
  • Compare a snapshot resource plan to the current version


Earned Value Dashboard - Work Package Level


Resource Planning

New resource planning capacity chart


 
Resource planning enhancements include: 
  • plan by resource classification
  • re-allocate effort across a pool
  • new embedded reports to visualise capacity v plan
  • add resources directly in the contract value and schedule screens

Client Side Project Management

Embedded PCG report auto generated off UniPhi client side pm daily data
 
Client side pm features have been focused on providing extensive automated PCG reporting capability. Feedback from early adopters has been great and we look forward to this enhanced reporting providing real benefit to our user base.
 
These Enhanced  PCG dashboards and template controls include:
  • New out of the box embedded PCG dashboard for client access
  • Moveable columns in table outputs for PDF reports
  • Add or remove columns to a table for PDF reports

User Experience

Document toolbar - new icon set
 
 
All of UniPhi's action buttons have received a makeover with new icons system wide. The cleaner and simpler navigational structure has allowed us to remove several clicks from certain workflows like rendering to PDF which is now one click instead of 3.
 
In support of our PCG outputs, document table formatting has been significantly improved with dynamic widths, the ability to carriage return and create far more complex headings
 
Finally, custom fields can now be set to display in the detail screen for end users to know more about the project they are viewing.
Custom fields displaying in the details screen of a project