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.

Create a new activity

To add a new activity, milestone, or project just press the "+" button as shown to the right in the illustration below.

This will 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. This will then present the Activity Attribute Panel in the Project View.

Activity Attributes

This attribute panel will allow you to create a new activity or edit an existing one:

The following options are available to you:

• Name - Enter or change the activity name here.

• Category - Select from Installation, Fabrication, or Engineering.

• 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:

• Start - Enter the start date for the activity. Type in the date or use the Calendar Picker.

• End - Enter the end date for the activity. Type in the date or use the Calendar Picker.

• Day Rate - Enter a day rate cost number for the activity. The number of days for the activity and the day rate will be multiplied and will show up in the Cost Operations Module.

• Action - Pick the Action for the activity from the following options as shown here:

For a description of the various activity actions, please see next section.

• Delete the Activity - This will delete the current selected activity.

Actions

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.).

For all these actionts the next step if then to select the asset.

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. For the actions "Show/Hide" and "Fade In/Out" you can also select a connection. If you want to change the action, click on the Change button.

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. To add new point to the animation path just click on the spline when you see the mouse pointer have a small + symbol next to it. You can then drag the point around to adjust your path.

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:

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 the "Change" button. This will display all animation types again and you can choose a different one.

Activity Ordering

Projects and Activities are easily organized into a hierarchical structure displayed in the left side pane of the Gannt chart as shown below. 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 the Activity Attribute window will show all the attributes. You can rename iy by editing the Name edit field.

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 by selecting between Hour, "Day", "Week", and "Month" by pressing the respective button as shown below:

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:

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.

Rewind/Play/Forward

• Rewind - When this button is pressed, it 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.

• Play - When this button is pressed, it 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.

• Forward - When this button is pressed, it 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.

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.

The Date field to the right of the slider will update itself when an animation plays to show the progress.

Export Activities

You can export your project activities for the active sub-project out to a Microsoft Project file from the Export menu:

This creates an XML file that can be loaded into MS Project. The file will be saved in your Download directory.

Import Activities

You can import existing project plans from either MS Project, or Primavera into your activities for the active "Tabbed" view from the User Settings menu.

See Microsoft Project, or Primavera for more information.