Deltek Acumen Fuse is a tool that complements your existing scheduling and Earned Value Management tools. Acumen Fuse provides advanced analytics and project intelligence, which can quickly highlight improvements to your schedules, improves schedule quality, schedule maturity, compliance and accountability. But it’s so much more than a just scheduler analyzer, so let’s take a closer look at Acumen Fuse’s capabilities.
Importing Into Deltek Acumen Fuse
Getting data into Deltek Acumen Fuse is a breeze and users can import schedules from a wide variety of tools including:
• Primavera P6 (and even Primavera P3)
• Deltek Open Plan
• Deltek Cobra
• Microsoft Project and Project Server
• Asta Powerproject
• PrismG2
• Primavera Risk Analysis (formerly Pertmaster)
• Microsoft Excel/XML data
After importing, you can very quickly check key schedule attributes including logic, float, activity sequencing, appropriate level of detail, cost, risk and Earned Value.
Acumen Fuse summarizes the detailed analysis with the Fuse Schedule Index which is a single schedule quality indicator giving you the means of scoring the quality of your project. The Fuse Schedule Index can also be used with Acumen Cloud which we’ll cover in a moment.
Acumen Fuse – Benchmarking
Schedule Cleanser lets you pick and choose redundant logic links, hard constraints, soft constraints, lags and leads to remove from the schedule, or even convert lags to activities.
You can also analyze multiple projects together and compare any changes over time.
Acumen Fuse – Multi Project
Acumen Fuse Compliance Capabilities
Acumen Fuse comes complete with hundreds of industry metric libraries including DCMA 14-Point Assessment, GAO Scheduling Best Practices and the NDIA GASP. It’s worth noting that all of these organizations also use Acumen Fuse internally. Particularly in the government mandated Earned Value Management industry, many customers use Acumen Fuse to conduct a self-assessment prior to an audit. And why not, where it’s highly likely that the auditing agency would be using Fuse to determine compliance.
In addition, you can also create your own custom libraries support standards that are specific to your organization. You can then slice and dice results by any grouping and any time segment for in-depth insight.
Acumen Fuse – 14 Point Assessment
Acumen Fuse Reporting
Acumen Fuse offers four types of reports, which can be directly published to PDF or Microsoft Office:
• Executive Briefing: A high-level synopsis of overall project status, characteristic descriptions, schedule quality analysis and resolution recommendations.
• Analyst Report: An in-depth “to-do” list of analysis results, with a detailed view of project quality and schedule strength either over time or by ribbons (activity groupings).
• Dashboard: An interactive summary of project status, schedule quality and analysis results, all integrated into a single view. The Acumen Fuse dashboard is configurable to simultaneously display multiple metrics options as charts, graphs or gauges. You can easily create custom reports by simply copying and pasting the dashboard view into Microsoft Office.
• API Custom Reports: A flexible means of extracting analysis results directly into third-party custom reports or external applications. Acumen Fuse’s Application Programming Interface [API] lets you generate custom reports or publish directly to web-based services and applications, to portals such as Microsoft SharePoint, or to third-party tools such as Crystal Reports.
Acumen Fuse – Reporting
Cloud Comparisons
Deltek offers Acumen Cloud, which allows you to anonymously and securely benchmark your Fuse analysis with thousands of comparable projects from other users around the world. Acumen Cloud separately analyzes your Fuse Index, which allows it to score and rank your schedule with other similar projects globally. Based on this, it will give you a percentile rank and success forecast.
Summary
Deltek’s Acumen Fuse is a must have addition to all organizations that want more realistic and improved quality schedules. There’s no doubt that Acumen Fuse provides better insight before and during project execution. I think no one would be surprised to know that there is a direct correlation between schedule quality and the success of a projects completion. Acumen Fuse is a great analytical and reporting tool to help eliminate unrealistic schedules, improve quality and ultimately deliver project success…and it’s fast!