By design, Schedule Validator is the easiest to use and most informative.

Schedule Validator is a powerful analytics tool, its scoring system makes it much easier to manage and more useful in setting standards. Identify hidden risks and schedule quality issues before they become a problem. The pricing is also a benefit to organizational budgets, both for individuals and enterprise users.

There is no limit to the number of projects you can create. Likewise, each project can accept any number of schedules.

Note that you can set the status of a project to either "Active", "Inactive" or "Archived" by using the gear icon next to the project name. Then at the top of the project list there is a slider button that will allow you to hide or show "Archived" projects. This allows you to both maintain a neat list of projects currently being working on, yet retain all of your history.

Yes. The narrative text and layout for reports can be customized on a project-by-project basis.

Simply click the gear icon next to the project name and you will be taken to the Project Settings page. Near the bottom of this page you will see three expandable areas that contain the Narrative text for the various reports. You can customize it to you liking. If you modify the text you will then also be presented with a button that will "reset" the text back to the original values.

Every time you do an update and move the scheduled or data date forward. Weekly is the most common update frequency.

The real power of Schedule Validator is realized when you're able to see how your schedule performs over time. The Comparison and Trend reports, for example, show this to you both graphically and in report format. More generally, many of the statistics are derived by looking at your schedules through time and giving the progress metrics in this way.

The DCMA (defense contract management administration) issued its 14 point schedule guidelines in 2007 and updated them in 2011. One of the 14 points was the Baseline Execution Index (BEI). A point system for percentage of successful activity finishes within a schedule window, few scoring systems include this score. Schedule Validator uses starts and finishes as opposed to just finishes in its score.

A “Published” schedule is an uploaded schedule (the latest in any particular schedule date), which is used for measuring progress and other schedule scores. Schedule Validator’s Essentials (the free version) publishes, automatically, the last schedule with a particular data date. The Enterprise user can select which project schedule was published, or submitted, and will be included in enterprise dashboard stastics.

The Critical Path Slip is a windows analysis of progress on the critical path in the window between selected schedules. The Critical Path Comparison report breaks down and shows you these details.

As the Enterprise title implies, this is extremely useful if you have 10+ individuals involved in the construction process; Such as Owners, Company Executives, Project Managers, Schedulers, Field Personnel, Subcontractors and others. You can establish an Organizational Chart of who can see what information, and how this information will roll-up and be available to people across your organization. It's an excellent option for larger companies and teams. The Enterprise oriented dashboards present a lot of information that would otherwise be very difficult to collect and analyze for stakeholders up the chain.

If you think this could be appropriate for you, we are pleased to give a guided personal demonstration. Please use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page and we'll get back to you quickly.

Schedule data is held in secure cloud based storage. Schedule Validator is a good repository for your native schedule data.

There are three icons, #1 Edit, #2 Download, and #3 Attachments.

#1 Edit - Allows you to edit the Description of the schedule within Schedule Validator. If the scheudle originated from Microsoft Project, you may also edit the Data Date.
#2 Download - Allows you to download the the schedule file that you originally uploaded.
#3 Attachments - Allows you to upload and maintain any documents you'd like associated with this schedule.

The short answer: An unfortunate situation in P6.

Keeping in mind that Schedule Validator reads the Data Date directly from the XER file, the question really is: Why is P6 displaying the wrong data date?

If you hit "Schedule" or F9 to schedule the project and have "All Projects Use their own data date" selected, the Data Date is not updated and will remain unchanged because this option in P6 tells it not to change the Data Date.

For the user this is an unfortunate situation that is hard to detect, because when this situation occurs in P6 it appears the data date has been changed, when in fact, it hasn't. The unchanged data date is used in the schedule calculation and is transferred to the XER file.

The full solution is to Schedule (F9) your project and make sure the "Apply selected data date to all projects" button has been chosen, then the P6 displayed Data Date and the exported XER Data Date will match.

The short answer: Because the Data Date field really is blank.

This problem has been most often observed with a schedule converted from MS Project where the Data Date has never been set. It comes into P6 that way and will stay that way until certain criteria are met.

To entice P6 to fill in the Data Date you will need to modify any activity and Reschedule (F9) the project making sure that "Apply selected data date to all open projects" has been chosen.

Then export the schedule to XER, import it into Schedule Validator and everything will work as expected.