SKEDSOFT

Operations Research

Introduction:

Each industries work with different projects work, which is the combinations of various activity, for this they require a particular schedule for planning, and also for quality management.

Project management:

a)      Programme Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)

b)      Critical Path Method (CPM)

  •         In management we used following two techniques for project management i.e.
  •       These are the two techniques that are widely used in planning and scheduling the large projects.
  •       A project is a combination of various activities. For example, Construction of a house can be considered as a project, construction of a house includes various activities such as searching for a suitable site, arranging the finance, purchase of materials, digging the foundation, construction of superstructure etc. Conducting a meeting includes printing of invitation cards, distribution of cards, arrangement of platform, chairs for audience etc.
  •        In planning and scheduling the activities of large sized projects, the two network techniques — PERT and CPM — are used conveniently to estimate and evaluate the project completion time and control the resources to see that the project is completed within the stipulated time and at minimum possible cost.
  •        Initially, projects were represented by milestone chart and bar chart. But they had little use in controlling the project activities.
  •          Bar chart simply represents each activity by bars of length equal to the time taken on a common time scale this chart does not show interrelationship between activities. It is very difficult to show the progress of work in these charts.
  •        An improvement in bar charts is milestone chart. In milestone chart, key events of activities are identified and each activity is connected to its preceding and succeeding activities to show the logical relationship between activities.
  •          In PERT and CPM the milestones are represented as events. Event or node is either starting of an activity or ending of an activity. Activity is represented by means of an arrow, which is resource consuming.
  •          Activity consumes resources like time, money and materials. Event will not consume any resource, but it simply represents either starting or ending of an activity. Event can also be represented by rectangles or triangles.