The Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects application is used from short to long term scheduling, anything greater than 2 or 3 weeks. It has a Gantt view of the work orders with a histogram of load and availability below this, for craft or crew types required by the selected work. The work view is based on queries of work orders, locations or assets. The queries are always made against work orders, but it may be work orders that reference the selected locations or assets. A rolling schedule may be used for scheduling the next 4-6 weeks, each week a new set of work orders is added to the schedule. 

The Large Projects application has a similar functional footprint to the Graphical Scheduling application but is used for schedules with greater than 500 work orders or activity bars. In the middle you see page numbers instead of all of the work orders being on the same page. The application uses server-side processing to allow it to manage projects in the thousands of activities, 50 work records are loaded at a time, rather than fetching all work orders. Child work records are collapsed by default.

Precedence logic can be added between work orders and tasks and logic lines are displayed but when the dependency is on another page an icon is shown instead, you can click on the icon to show the details. CPM scheduling is performed on the whole project on the server. Backward pass and calculation of float and hence the ability to display the critical path are available as they are for the Graphical Scheduling application. Filtering, sorting and search works across the whole project.

The resource part of the Graphical Scheduling Large Projects application is not kept synchronised with the activity bars; it is calculated on demand. The calculation is only performed for the time frame that is displayed and when you want to understand the resource load versus availability you need to use the Refresh button.

Instead of recalculating summary activities bars when the durations of child work orders change there is a button to Recalculate Summary Start/End Times. Percent Complete is calculated as a background task rather than immediately. There is an action “Create Schedule From Graphical Scheduling” which allows you to create your large project schedule from a schedule that already exists in Graphical Scheduling. The action Show Activity Ancestors will show you where your current record exists in the work order hierarchy.

PM forecasting is not supported in the Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects application.