Horizon Planner

Horizon Planner is the second generation of our project management solution that unifies resource and business planning in a single, easy-to-use, cloud-native application. Building on our decade long experience in this field, Horizon Planner allows you to:

  • Manage your resources, be it employees or assets.
  • Define capabilities, combine them into capability groups, and associate them with your resources.
  • Create roles with complex capability requirements and ensure that assigned resources satisfy all requirements.
  • Schedule your business activities on a familiar Gantt chart.
  • Oversee resource allocations and holidays on an interactive timetable chart.
  • Categorize and search your resources and activities with a flexible tagging system.
  • Create Excel reports.
  • Decrease your ecological footprint using the built-in carbon emission estimator.
  • Add attachments to business objects using a cloud document storage.
  • Let employees manage their calendar and data on their profile page.
  • Structure your resources and activities into overlapping organizations with granular user access control.

Our guiding principle is that any quality application must satisfy a set of key requirements:

  • Have a clear purpose.
  • Be lean, refined, flexible, and easy to use.
  • Bring as much value to customers as possible.
  • Be reliant and responsive.

But a quality application alone does not make a quality product. In our experience, it is just as important to:

  • Teach users how to efficiently work with the application.
  • Have a continuous feedback loop between users and developers that drives improvement and refinement.
  • Offer fast, insightful, and kind support.

We also welcome unique, customer-specific requirements that call for tailor-made solutions, be it integration with other business applications, KPIs, automation, or reporting.

Resource Management

Project management applications vary a lot in terms of their resource management capabilities from very basic solutions to full-blown ERP and payroll systems. Horizon Planner aims to strike a middle ground that fully covers planners’ needs – from contact and location information to file attachments and organizational data – but is simple enough for convenient daily work. On top of these default features, Horizon Planner can be integrated with other business applications to provide advanced customer-specific functionalities.

Resources view is the central component for managing resources. Its simple layout and design – a list with an action bar and per-item menus; and collapsible cards for different types of data with all the necessary actions – will be a recurring theme throughout the application, making feature exploration easy for new users and daily use convenient for existing ones.

Capability Management

Capability management is a central, distinctive feature of Horizon Planner that no other project management application offers. Users can model all capabilities that are relevant for flawless assignment planning – for example “Electrician”, “US Visa”, “Offshore Safety Training”, or “Truck, 20t” –, associate them with resources, and use them – even in combination – as requirements for tasks. While being very simple, this concept enables a wide range of features to be built around it from project validation to KPI calculation and reporting.

Resources and capabilities are inseparable concepts in Horizon Planner, so it makes sense to manage all capability-related information on Resources view, right next to resources, using the previously described familiar design. Using this combined view, users can easily create new capabilities, combine them into custom capability groups, associate them with resources, set validity dates for resource capabilities such as certificates and visas, and get warnings when said capabilities are about to expire.

Gantt Chart

The Gantt chart – similarly to most project management applications – is the central planning component in Horizon Planner. Classic Gantt charts are best suited to short or relatively small projects with clear requirements and scope that can be efficiently executed using the waterfall project management methodology. While most clients can adapt to this classic solution, in our fast-changing world a modern, continuous, more agile planning and management style usually better suits their needs, which is why we designed Horizon Planner’s Gantt chart specifically for such workflows.

Timeline view contains everything that is time related, including the Gantt chart. The left sidebar of the chart is occupied by the project tree and a command bar with project creation and filtering actions. The leaves of the tree specify potentially complex capability requirements that resources must satisfy in order to be assigned. Each item in the tree has a specialized menu with all the actions that are needed for daily planning tasks. The chart itself is fairly simple and easy to use, with full gesture and drag and drop support. Assignments of opened activities are shown as colored rectangles. Overlapping assignments are automatically grouped together into so called mobilizations, an extra layer of structure providing various convenience features.

Timetables

A mandatory component of every project management application, Timetables shows an interactive overview of resource assignments and holidays. Advanced filtering features and synchronization with the Gantt chart allows the user to conveniently find the best available resources for unassigned tasks.

Timeline view is also home to Timetables. The left sidebar of this chart shows a resource list with powerful filtering options at the top, including a capability, tag, and name filter to make resource selection as flexible as possible. The chart – synchronized with the Gantt chart – shows all assignments and holidays of each resource with all the necessary editing actions and full gesture support. Overlapping assignments and holidays – potential planning errors – are clearly visible and easy to fix.

Tagging and Searching

Easy-to-use searching and filtering features are an essential part of every project management and tracking application. Horizon Planner offers an intuitive tagging system along with various context-dependent searching, filtering, and auto-complete features, allowing the user to focus on what is important and not be overwhelmed by irrelevant data.

In Horizon Planner, tags are managed on a dedicated Tags view, and they consist of a category and a value pair, with the category providing the semantics for the value. An example tag might be “Customer: MIL Innovations”, and you may add this tag to your projects associated with that customer. Later you can filter the Gantt view to only show projects belonging to this customer.

Every business object can have an arbitrary number of tags, and tag-based searching and filtering is widely available throughout the application. In combination with various other support features like text, capability, or time-based search options, it empowers users to stay focused on their current tasks.

Excel Reports

Horizon Planner offers various default Excel report generation templates that are easy to use, require only a few input parameters, and have sensible defaults. As a result, reports can typically be generated with a single click, saving significant time and speeding up strategic decisions.

We acknowledge that reporting greatly differs from company to company, and all software solutions need to integrate well with established workflows. This is why we strongly advise our Customers to discuss their reporting needs with us so we can develop targeted solutions to aid their business.

On Report view users can see all available report templates and a short description for each. Clicking one of those templates opens the corresponding configuration dialog, where settings like the timeframe the report should cover can be adjusted. When the user clicks the “Download” button, the Excel report will immediately be generated by the server and the download process will start automatically.

CO2 Emission Optimization

A major challenge of the 21st century is decreasing our environmental impact, which can also lead to a more cost-efficient operation for companies. Horizon Planner offers an in-house CO2 emission estimator that rivals well-known solutions in terms of accuracy and is tightly integrated into the planning and reporting workflow, turning emission reduction from an inconvenience into a rewarding and unobtrusive process.

CO2 emission is calculated for every assignment assuming that the resource need to travel to the assignment location at the start of the assignment and back home at the end of the assignment. Users can see the emission information in both the Assignment Editor and the Assignment Planner – in the latter case they can even sort potential resources by this value, so selecting one with lower carbon footprint is not an encumbrance.

Cloud Document Storage

Horizon Planner’s built-in document storage allows users to conveniently store file attachments and associate them with business objects such as resources and activities. The major advantage of this integrated approach over standalone solutions like shared drives is that documents are always well-organized, and the relevant ones are always just a click away.

Profile Page

Horizon Planner is not only for project managers, planners, and HR personnel. It can potentially be used by all employees of a company, as it features a profile page where every user can check their upcoming tasks, update their contact information, or request a holiday. Not having to contact management or administrative departments for all these minor tasks reduces the administrative burden throughout the company.

There is an important distinction between a resource and a user. An employee of the company is represented as a resource, so planners can assign them to specific tasks. A user of the application can log in to the site, manage resources, make assignments, create reports etc. – whatever their permissions allow. In practice however the same person can be both a resource and a user at the same time – and in Horizon Planner you can make that connection explicit. All the features that the profile page provides are built on top of this connection, allowing a signed in user to see and manage the information of their associated resource.

Resource Optimization

Daily project planning often revolves around finding just the right person for the job. Horizon Planner has a view dedicated to solving this problem, focusing on a single activity at a time. Planners can search for resources based on their capabilities, tags, and the estimated carbon footprint of the required travel.

Proper resource optimization also requires detailed modelling of the requirements. Just as real-world tasks often have complex requirements, Horizon Planner allows you to create roles requiring more than one capability from a single resource. There are options to search for resources who fit a specific role, so planners can immediately see the best candidates.

Planning Chain

In many cases, planning and resource management is a series of tasks involving many smaller steps such as creating resources with capabilities and tags, setting up new activities with tags and requirements, and of course planning assignments and selecting resources. In Horizon Planner, all these tasks are assisted by specialized, single-purpose wizards, easing the cognitive burden of each step.

These tasks are usually not done in isolation: resource creation is often followed by the creation of further resources, planning consists of activity creation, requirement specification, precise timing, and of course resource selection. Going through all these planning steps one-by-one several times a day can be time-consuming – Horizon Planner solves this by guiding the user from each action to its natural continuations, resulting in a greatly improved workflow.

Inspector

Sometimes you just must double-check a resource before creating an assignment, but the last thing you want is to interrupt the workflow by navigating away from your current task. Horizon Planner’s Inspector panel provides convenient access to the most important data of any business object anywhere in the application, so you can keep your focus where it’s needed.

For example, the resource inspector shows contact information, capabilities, upcoming tasks, and so on. It also has a button that navigates users to the Resources view, where they can see and edit all the data related to that resource. The Inspector itself keeps track of previously inspected business objects, allowing navigation between them. This makes it a useful tool to make recently seen tasks or resources easily accessible.

Administrative Tools

Horizon Planner has a dedicated view to handle administrative tasks. An admin user can invite more users to the application, fine-tune their permissions or suspend a user with a single click. They can also create organizational units within the company that allows for more structure and more focused access control.

Horizon Planner servers do much more than just serve the application. Automated backups provide safety and fault-tolerance for Customers, data can be restored within minutes if needed. Application logs are collected on-site in Graylog, an enterprise-grade logging solution, that offers real-time monitoring and usage statistics to identify problems before our users do.

Design and Usability

Horizon Planner was built using Microsoft’s UI framework, following design guidelines and best practices. It provides a refined, consistent, and familiar look, making users feel at home.

Interactive charts make the application convenient to work with. There is no need to navigate complex menus to create a new assignment at a specific time or to reschedule an activity. Instead, they provide features like drag and drop and can be moved around using hand gestures, keeping modern, touch enabled devices in mind.

Deployment and technologies

Horizon Planner offers both on-site and cloud deployment possibilities, horizontal and vertical scalability, and single- or multi-application setups, to fit any company size and organizational structure.

All of this is enabled by building our modern codebase around the latest versions of state of the art and leading technologies such as MongoDB, Python, Flask, TypeScript, React, and Docker. This ensures product security, reliability, performance, and the potential for long-term, continuous improvement.

MIL Innovations A/S

MIL Innovations A/S was founded in 2008 in Molde (Norway) by Dr. David Bredström, Dr. Asmund Olstad, and Dr. Kjetil Haugen. The primary incentive to establish the company was to make available the latest discoveries in operations research to logistics and operations management at larger companies, companies that today are facing an ever-increasing need of cost efficiency and profit maximization.

We develop modern, rich, and creative decision support tools for business planners, manufacturers, retailers, and service producers using state of the art technologies. As of today we have developed desktop, cloud, and mobile software systems with specialized optimization solutions for problems such as resource, logistics, and production scheduling, demand forecasting, purchase planning, and inventory control.

Visit https://www.milinnovations.com/ for more information.

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