Activity Module

Field Activity Planner spans the entire process of offshore and subsea installations, as well as marine operations – from planning and feasibility to preparation and actual operations. It gives users a simplified view of activities being carried out offshore, together with the status of vessels, rigs and installations. This is done by the Activity Module.

This module supports Gannt chart entries and also has "visual" time line support with "Play", "Pause" and "Scrubber" support for granular time control and easy "What-If" scenario planning. The Gannt chart supports critical path, task dependencies, zoomable time line, easy drag-and-drop task ordering, and much more. You can also link task to activities that can be animated such as vessel operations for a complete visualization of field operations.

Activity Window

The activities window area will show all activities entered for the project as shown below.

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To add a new activity, milestone, or project just press the "+" button. This will allow you to define a new activity, milestone or project that will take place including specifying a time duration and entering a descriptive name. The type of activity can be chosen from the drop-down menu named "Type".

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The "Type" drop-down menu selections works as follows;

  • "Activity" creates a new standalone task.
  • "Project" creates a new folder where you can add in several tasks. (Use the "+" sign to the left of that particular folder to do this).
  • "Milestone" creates a milestone symbol in the time line. See sample below:

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Projects and Activities are easily organized into a hierarchical structure displayed in the left side pane of the Gannt chart as shown above. Here you can also collapse and explode the Project folders using the "+" or "-" icons to the left of the folder name.

You can also click on an Activity entry and whilst holding down the left mouse button reposition by moving the activity upwards or downwards. When you release the button the Activity will then be in the desired order. Note! You can't move a task created inside a Project folder outside that folder.

To rename an activity just press the name or the Gantt bar itself, and change the name in the activity window that will be displayed. To exit the activity window just press the "X" in the top right corner or just on the stage. The changes you make in the activity window is automatically saved.

You can also move the activity bar itself directly in the activity (GANNT) window to where you want the activity to start/end by clicking on the desired activity, and holding down the left mouse button whilst moving the activity to the desired date.

Furthermore the Activity bar itself also allows you easily reduce or extend its duration by a click-and-hold operation at either end of the activity bar and adjust it to the desired date duration.

Time line resolution

You can specify the time line resolution between "Day", "Week" and "Month" resolution by pressing the respective button as shown below.

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Animation Controls

A very powerful feature of Field Activity Planner is the ability to visualize all planned activities being carried out offshore, together with the status of vessels, rigs and installations on a timeline.

After you have assigned "Actions" such as "Move", "Show", "Hide" etc. to activities you can visualize them on your timeline by using the Animation control panel show below:

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Rewind/Play/Forward

The Rewind button when pressed, will move or reposition if you will the time slider to the very beginning e.g. the Project start date as specified in the project settings when the project was created.

The Play button when pressed, will start to play or visualize the timeline by animating all created activity actions in the Stage view. Pressing Play again will Pause the animation.

The Forward button when pressed, will move or reposition the time slider at the very end e.g. the Project end date as specified in the project settings when the project was created.

Speed Factor

To better visualize the timeline of marine operations and installation of assets we have introduced a speed factor for each individual asset present on stage. This allows you to specify each asset that has an assigned action with an individual speed by adjusting the value in the "Speed factor" dialog box as shown above. You can either enter a value directly in the edit box, or press the up/down arrow icons to the right of the edit box after an asset has been selected or made active if you will.

Timeline Scrubber

The time scrubber allows you to seamlessly move forward or backward along the project timeline at your own speed to better observe specific details at any given point in time. Simply select the slider bar and click-and-hold while dragging the slider in the desired direction.

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Actions

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Actions is what makes your activities visible on stage. Each action can be considered a form of animation or visualization if you will. The Define Activity dialog takes you through a 3 step process

1 - Action

To add a new action to your activity just select the activity you want and then choose between the following actions to assign to it:

  • "Move" Choose an asset on stage that you want to move e.g. animate.
  • "Show" lets you choose an asset or connection you want to make visible.
  • "Hide" lets you select an asset or connection to hide.
  • "Fade In" lets you select an asset or connection to fade in.
  • "Fade Out" lets you select an asset or connection fade out.
  • "Idle" will assign the activity described without the asset moving anywhere (E.g. preparation, spooling etc.).

2 - Which asset

After the desired action has been selected e.g. move you need to select an asset to perform an action on. Simply click the desired asset on the stage to select it. Note! For the actions "Show/Hide" and "Fade In/Out" you can also select a connection.

3 - Where

If your selected action is Move you need to select a position on the stage for the asset to move to! Do this by clicking on the desired stage location. This will draw an animation spline from its current position to the new position you selected on the stage. The drawn animation spline you can then add curve-points to allowing you to create a curved vector spline that the animation path will follow.

You can of course assign actions in the same moment you create the activity itself.

If you want to change the endpoint of your animation later on just press the asset itself, the gantt bar, or the name of the activity. This will reveal the animation vector and you can just click the end point and drag it to your new position and subsequently edit the animation spline again if needed. See below for an example:

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Take a look at our how-to-videos here for examples on animation.

If you want to change the action itself just press the gantt bar or the name of the activity and press "Change". This will display all animation types again and you can choose a different one.

Export Activities

You can export your project activities for the active "Tabbed" view out to an Microsoft Excel file. Simply click on the user icon in the top right corner, and you will see the "Export Activity" menu item in the drop down list.

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Selecting this will then generate the MS Excel file in your download folder.

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Import Activities

You can import an existing project plan from MS Project into your activities for the active "Tabbed" view.

To import a MPP or a .xml project file, go to your user setting menu in the top right corner, and select "Import Activities" from the drop-down menu item list.

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This will present a file import dialog, where you select the MPP file that you wish to import.

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If you already have data loaded it will also prompt you if want to merge the imported file with your existing data or load as new activities. And if your existing project dates do not align with the project dates to be loaded you will be prompted if it is ok to extend the date range.

Support for Primavera Activity Import

We have now added support for importing activity schedules from Primavera as an XML file. To import a Primavera file, select the user drop down menu in the top right corner and select the Import Primavera option as shown below:

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This will bring up a file dialog for you to select the activity file that you want to import, as below:

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You will then see a progress dialog appear as the schedule is imported, and the “Activities” module will be populated with the activities once complete.

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Note! At present this has only been tested for Primavera version P6. We are also working on Safran and also supporting ILAP.