Asta Development
Company Overview
Asta Development released its first product, an engineering and construction project management system called Asta Powerproject, in 1988. About a decade later, the company followed that up with Asta Teamplan, a portfolio and resource management tool for a broad range of industries. Today Asta Development has more than 40,000 users in the United Kingdom, the Unites States, Europe and Asia.
Thame, Oxfordshire
Web: astadev.com
Asta Powerproject is a construction project management tool that, according to Asta Development, is used by 45 of the United Kingdom's top 50 contractors.
Users of Asta Powerproject can create hierarchical structures for projects and sub-projects based on internal workflows; they can link tasks across projects to identify relationships, the vendor said. Reports, meanwhile, can be tailored to individual recipients, from high-level reports for senior management to task lists for subcontractors.
This construction project management software can also produce cash flow forecasts and perform earned value analysis; create subcontractor task lists, which can be exported as PDF or Excel files or viewed using the free Asta Project Viewer; use Gantt charts to link task items within a construction schedule and perform a critical path analysis of a schedule.
Add-ons to Asta Powerproject include the following:
- Asta Executive Reporting, which includes customized reports;
- Asta Project Analyzer, which can compare two project plans as a means of resolving disputes or determining the cause of variances;
- Asta Siteprogress, which lets site managers enter report data in the field; this data is then automatically updated in Asta Powerproject;
- Asta Risk Analysis, which uses Monte Carlo simulations to determine how critical a task is to the successful outcome of a project, and
- Asta Powernet, which lets users display task relationships in a network diagram instead of a bar chart.
The enterprise version of Asta Powerproject lets multiple users access the same project task information at the same time. It is also designed to collect data from multiple job sites, the vendor said.
Online demos and a 30-day free trial are available at the Asta Powerproject Demo Centre.
Asta Easyplan is construction planning software designed specifically for trade contractors and small construction companies. It uses an interface based on Windows Explorer, complete with wizards that will generate a construction plan based on a project's start date, task order and duration; users can also track costs against the activities in those plans, the vendor said.
Asta Easyplan also comes with templates that aim to make it easier for a contractor to create professional plans for clients, the vendor said. This construction planning software can share files with Asta Powerproject as well as Microsoft Project and Primavera software. Asta Easyplan documents can also be exported as PDF files.
Asta Sitecontrol is a construction site management system that lets project managers create a real-time record of a site's daily activities, from work orders to weather conditions to materials used. That information can then be synchronized with Asta Powerproject, where it can be used for key tasks such as generating invoices or salaries.
This construction site management system stores all documents and contacts in a central library. Users can also import pricelists and attach them to work orders.
Daily and weekly reports can be exported from Asta Sitecontrol as PDF files, the vendor said.