SmartPM offers two powerful actions to enhance your project scheduling: the Schedule Quality Checker and the Schedule Comparison Tool. These tools are designed to help you assess and compare your project schedules, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in your planning process. This article focuses on the Schedule Comparison Tool.

The Schedule Comparison Tool allows you to analyze differences between schedules and track changes between them. This is essential for monitoring project progress and verifying the impact of changes.

Key Features of the Schedule Comparison Tool:

Baseline comparisons: Compare an updated schedule against a baseline to quickly see differences.

Revision Comparison: While SmartPM cannot analyze schedules with the same data date within projects, the Schedule Comparison Tool does allow you to.

Change log reports: Identify added, deleted, or modified activities, along with changes in durations, logic, or constraints.
Multiple file support: Compare multiple schedule files in one session, even if they have different data dates.

To use the Schedule Comparison Tool:

Open the global navigation menu and click Compare Schedules.
Upload your baseline schedule and click Next.
Upload one or more updated schedules to compare against the baseline.
Click Next to run the comparison.
Review the results, which will produce the SmartPM change log for each schedule against the baseline

After each major schedule update or revision, use the Schedule Comparison Tool to track changes and understand how the schedule has evolved. Regularly reviewing both tools helps maintain the accuracy and reliability of your schedules, while documenting any changes and issues provides a clear history for audits and stakeholder reporting.