DRAPER & ASSOCIATES provided project management assistance to the Consortium for Intelligent Integrated Manufacturing Planning and Execution (CIIMPLEX) beginning in May 1997, a year-and-a-half after the inception of the Consortium. The Consortium consisted of several software manufacturers, three universities and a major industrial manufacturer. Consortium members were to work together to develop a methodology for integrating, in a plug-and-play manner, various software applications used in a manufacturing environment without requiring modification of the base software applications. This would allow a manufacturing entity to purchase best-of-breed software without having to incur the great expense of paying an integrator to write legacy code to enable these software packages to communicate. The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) funded this research and development effort. Overall IBM, a member of the consortium, provided management. Draper & Associates worked for IBM as part of the CIIMPLEX Project Office.

Draper & Associates' initial involvement with CIIMPLEX was the result of IBM senior management's desire to bring focused direction to the project. Draper & Associates' initial role was to document issues identified during meetings and assign responsibility for follow-up. Additionally, Draper was asked to develop detailed day-to-day implementation schedules for a couple of specific applications that were sub-projects related to CIIMPLEX.

Draper & Associates' role was subsequently expanded to include development of an Overall Project Schedule for the entire CIIMPLEX Project. Because of the research and development nature of this project, the Overall Project Schedule consisted of three distinct pieces: (1) development of and depiction of the logic flow associated with the major components of the project, (2) a high level time-dependent view of these components delineated by version for the life of the project and beyond, and (3) detailed schedules encompassing all the development tasks for each separate version. Generally, each version involved a year's worth of activity; consequently, there was time overlap of the various versions. The detailed schedules for each version were the basis for maintaining schedule control of the project.

The budget for the life of this project was established prior to engaging Draper & Associates. Nine months into the firm's involvement, Draper & Associates' role was further expanded to integrate the resource and budget management process with the project schedule. Draper collected data from all project participants to ascertain resources required to complete each task on the detailed schedules. Schedules were then revised to include only those planned activities that could be adequately resourced. This process validated the project budget. To further facilitate budget management, the resource loading was used to validate invoiced amounts from the consortium members and their subcontractors.

Project Office update meetings were held bi-weekly to ensure schedule commitments were maintained. The basis for these meetings was the Near Term Schedule, the day-to-day implementation schedule developed from the detailed schedule for each version. Additionally, issue identification and tracking were accomplished using a Lotus Notes database.

In addition to these meetings, quarterly executive management committee meetings were held whereby the voting membership of the Consortium was appraised of schedule status. The detailed schedule for each version was used for this meeting.

Lastly, Draper & Associates was asked to provide the bulk of information for the quarterly reports contractually required by the NIST government grant for this work.