Product News

Portfolio Simulator 2009 Service Pack 1 Coming in January!

Major highlights of Portfolio Simulator 2009 SP1 include:

• Curves have been renamed to Contours in the user interface.
• Work Contours are now defined as standard Contours:
• Work Contours are no longer limited to 10 factors.
• Sessions upgraded to SP1 will have work contours moved to the Setup – Contours area.
• Sensitivity Scenarios now support more than 200 # of Starts.
• An uncommon error has been fixed in the user interface regarding checkboxes, scenarios, and simulating.
• Improvements to the Portfolio Builder add-in have been made:
• Importing of contours has been modified to support the flexible number of work contour factors.
• Per-task rollup from Project Server is now supported.
• An option to toggle the displaying of validation results has been added.
• Work contours can now be defined when importing from Excel.
• Greater support when importing from MS Project has been implemented.
• Improvements for strategic rollup have been implemented.
• Improvements to the Optimization add-in have been made:
• Enabled scrolling in the results – details grid.
• Add variable information to the Optimization Summary area.
• Fixed issues in the user interface.
• Fixed issue in Excel Reports add-in where SQL database command timeout was fixed at 30 seconds, and not the value entered in the Portfolio Simulator – Tools – Options dialog.

A full list of changes and fixes is available from your ProModel representative.

ProModel, MedModel, ServiceModel 2010 Coming Soon!

This new version will be released in early 2010.  In addition to several fixes, 2010 will contain the following new enhancements:

• Calendars – definition of shifts and time off (holiday, vacation, etc.) for locations and resources will be done using the new .NET Calendar Editor.  It will expand upon the Shift Editor and provide a more accurate and intuitive way for scheduling resource availability.
• Additional graphic formats supported – JPG, TIFF, PNG, ICO and GIF89a with transparency.
• Excel 2007 support for external Arrival and Entity-Location files
• Help system online
• Windows 7 Certified
• Six Sigma Analysis with integration to Minitab – select which variable statistic you want to do a Six Sigma analysis on in your model, run the simulation, and Minitab will automatically open and create Capability Analysis and Capability Sixpack charts.  Because the simulation data is populated in Minitab’s spreadsheets, further Minitab tests and analysis can be done.

Some of the fixes included will be:

• Labels, axis settings and resource unit changes in Dynamic Plots were not persisting.
• Resource utilization statistics for parent resources in Dynamic Plots were not being calculated correctly.
• The file paths in connection strings for database array importing were not auto-updating after installing a model package and running the model.
• Search and replace was not finding text in the database connection string and data access fields.
• DTLeft function returned the total length of off-shift or break time instead of the remaining off-shift or break time.
• DTLength is a new function which will return the total length of off-shift or break time (like DTLeft previously did).
• And many more fixes…