AtlasCom construction equipment. Recently, management has noticed that manufacturing productivity and quality has been falling behind the competitors. In response, several projects were launched, one of which was to focus on reengineering the factory layout. Management tasked a two - tier team to get the job done. The rst tier was the core project team, a cross - functional group of middle managers responsible for managing the project effort. The second tier, the extended team of manufacturing specialists, was in charge of doing the project work. Faced with the lack of a formal project management process and experience, the core team received basic project management training before hiring a consultant who helped develop a detailed CPM schedule. Gearing to launch the execution, the core team explained the CPM schedule to the extended team members, asking them to get the work started and to report progress in a week. The problem was, the extended team members commented, that because of CPM's complexity, they were not able to use it as a basis for planning, organizing, and reporting. A few days later, a quality improvement project (QIP) including members from both teams was chartered to nd a solution to the problem. I n its 50+ year history, AtlasCom has excelled in manufacturing stateofthe-art specialized WHAT IS CPM? Developed by the DuPont Corporation in the 19505, Critical Path Method (CPM) is a network diagram technique for analyzing, planning, and scheduling projects. It provides a means of representing project activities as nodes or arrows, determining which of them are \"critical\" in their impact on project completion time and scheduling them in order to meet a target date at a their impact on project completion time and scheduling them in order to meet a target date at a minimum cost. CPM uses deterministic activity time estimates (the most likely), rather than probabilistic activity time estimates (e.g., the optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely) such as those used in Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). The typical use of CPM was for construction projects, although it is nowadays applied in many types of projects across various industries. The process of constructing a CPM diagram requires the following inputs: A list of activities, from the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), required to complete the project, ' The estimated duration of each activity, and The dependencies (predecessor/successor relationships) between the activities. 247% A Immediate Duration Activity Description Predecessor (Days) Start O Get Materials for a 10 DADON Get Materials for b 20 Manufacture a b. c 30 Manufacture b b, c 20 Polish b e 40 Assemble a and b d. f 20 Finish g 0 h Figure 1 shows an example of a CPM diagram. Normally, the diagram shows a number of different paths from Start to Finish, defined as sequences of dependent activities. To calculate the time to pass through a path, add up the times for all activities in the path. The "critical path" is the longest path in time from Start toFinish. It indicates the minimum time necessary to complete the entire project. Essentially, the critical path is the highest priority path to be managed. WHAT WAS THE 51$ch SOLUTION? In a week, QIP proposed the solution: a short - term outlook schedule. The solution suggested extracting activities from CPM that were owned by a team member and were to be done in the coming two weeks, rather than the entire schedule, presenting them in a Gantt chart format. Familiar with the Gantt chart, each member thus should have a user - friendly two - week plan that they could start using for organizing work and reporting and updating on a weekly basis. Discussion items 1. Do you agree/disagree with the AtlasCom solution? Why? 2. What are the pros and cons of the CPM diagram? 3. From Figure 1, what is the project critical path? 4. Is it possible for a project to have more than one critical path? Justify your answer. 5. Use the outcome of your network diagram to produce the Gantt chart for the project