Finish Analysis Profile – The Official Site for Zümmer

A “Cash-flow S-Curve” is a very valuable tool that reveals much information about the characteristics of the scheduled Project. However, you may often come upon a schedule that is not Cost or Expense loaded. You can still produce an “S-Type Curve” by accumulating the Actual, Early, Late (and Mid) Finish Dates of the Tasks and Resource Dependent activities.

Although this method may be a rough simulation of an actual Cost Load distribution, the resulting curve, in most cases can surprisingly provide a reasonable model of the Cash-flow as if the schedule was cost loaded. In the resulting curve, instead of defining the Y-Axis as Cumulative Cost, the Y-Axis is defined as the Cumulative Finish Date count.

Astute Zümmer user, Stephen Paterson, notes that these curves can be useful on types of projects where the client does not want it’s costs published out to all and sundry.

Zümmer’s Finish Analysis Profile Report (Illustrated below), completes this tasks by:

Generating and Actual, Early, Late, and Mid Cumulative Finish Curves.

a. The Actual Finish Curve distributes the Actual Finish date of each completed Task or Resource Dependent between the Start of the Project up to the Data Date.

b. The Early Finish Curve distributes the Remaining Early Finish date of each Task or Resource Dependent activity between the Data Date and the latest Finish date in the Project.

c. The Late Curve distributes the Remaining Late Finish date of each Task or Resource Dependent activity between the Data Date and the latest Finish date in the Project.

d. The Mid Finish Curve calculates the midpoint daily value between the distributed Early and Late Finish Dates.

e. The height of the Vertical Data Date line is defined by the Total Count of Tasks & Resource Dependent activities in the Project.

f. The X Axis displays the Profile Date in which the range is bounded from the Earliest Project Start Date to the Latest Project Finish Date.

g. The Y Axis displays to Cumulative Finish Count which is bounded from 0 to the Total Count of Tasks and Resource Dependent activities. This means that Level of Effort, WBS Summary, and Milestone activities are not included in the graph.

h. The Total Task + Resource Dependent count is also displayed in the bottom of the report.

2. Storing the graph and distribution data into a spreadsheet.

a. In addition to generating a Finish Analysis Profile report, Zümmer also generates an editable spreadsheet containing the actual chart appearing in the report along with the supporting daily and cumulative Actual, Early, Late, and Mid Finish distribution calculations.

When the Finish Analysis Profile Curve is selected for previewing or printing, in addition to the printed/preview-able report, Zümmer generates a spreadsheet supplemental file for the curve produced in the report.

The spreadsheet output file is stored in the Zummer/Output folder. In the illustration below, the Project TST-BL1-UP02 was selected for printing with the file listed. Note the file structure prefix consists of “FAP” then the next filename segment consists of the Project ID, “TST-BL1-UP02”. The final filename segment, [97LLK], is a random computer system generated 5-digit suffix.

The “FAP” file in the “Chart1” Tab contains the “Finish Analysis Profile” Curves shown as below:

Since the file above is a generated spreadsheet, the visual content can be customized by the user and/or Cut/Copy & Pasted into another document.

In the “FAP” file chart view above, shown below is a partial section of the ChartData tab and the raw data used to plot the curve shown above: (Note: Rows 3 thru 61 and 66 thru 404 are hidden for instructional purposes).

Column A – “Profile Date” contains the series of dates from the earliest date in the selected Project listing daily down to the latest date in the selected Project.

Columns B, C and D contain the cumulative Early, Late and Mid Finish Date Count Series respectively for the Finish Analysis Profile curve on the graph displayed in the Chart1 tab.

Column E contains the cumulative Actual Finish Date Series for the Finish Analysis Profile curve on the graph displayed in the Chart1 tab.

Column F contains the Total number of Tasks and Resource Dependent activities used to generate the vertical Data Date line in the graph.

Columns G, H, I and J contain the daily total Early, Late, Mid and Actual Count Series respectively used to calculate the cumulative values shown in Columns B, C, D and E respectively.