Letter from Jean Charbonneau, ing. - President/CEO

Dear partners,

We want to wish you and your families all the best for 2012!

As most of you already know, Visual Planner Suite received the prestigious IBM Tivoli 2011 Integrated Service Management Library Excellence Award at the last Pulse 2011. This award was given to the software add-on that attracted the most attention among all Tivoli software add-ons, not just Maximo. It was awarded for the first time in 2011 and we are very proud that Visual Planner was recognized as the most popular add-on of the whole Tivoli software suite. In 2012, let's continue to pursue the growth and recognition of Visual Planner Suite as the leading solution to perform effective planning and scheduling of day-to-day work backlog with Maximo.

Visual Planner is the result of intense effort and vision. We are very proud that this effort is now fully recognized by IBM.

Many large organizations all over the world like Gasco in United Arab Emirates, Enmax in Canada and Sydney Water in Australia have adopted Visual Planner as their standard to perform effective planning and scheduling with Maximo. The network of Visual Planner resellers has also continued to grow all around the globe.

We have continued to enhance the product and we are announcing a new release of Visual Planner, which includes schedule compliance tracking for day-to-day backlog. We are introducing a new weekly schedule concept in Maximo with start and end dates as well as statuses (Draft, Approved, In Progress, Closed). Work assignments will require a justification code to be removed from schedules in progress. A new PM workload balancing screen has also been added along with several functionalities to handle the scheduling of routes and we are also showing the new start and finish constraints dates and allowing the users to modify them on the calendar screens. The attached document includes the details of the principal enhancements and a demo VM of this new release will be available very soon for resellers who registered for the annual Visual Planner demo VM subscription.

Our development roadmap for 2012 is very exciting. At the end of Q1, we will release a version that takes advantage of the new Maximo 7.5 fields, like work order/task predecessors. We will also release a version allowing the system administrator or users to specify the columns they want to display in each of the calendar screens, as well as in the details pop-up windows. We will also add sections to manage crew availability (in Maximo for Utilities and core Maximo when released) and tools availability.

Our goal is to maintain Visual Planner as the leader for managing day-to-day work backlog and continue differentiating it with the other tools available that use a project management approach with a single Gantt screen (MX Project, Primavera, Maximo Scheduler), rather than calendar screens that offer a complete view of scheduled and unscheduled work, which is better suited for day-to-day backlog management.

In 2012, we also want to focus on our current customer base to make sure they get the highest value on their Visual Planner investment. In 2011, we performed several joint implementations with partners and coached their staff on implementing effective planning and scheduling using Visual Planner (see the Implementation SOW attached). We encourage all our partners to perform at least one joint implementation with CiM. For many clients, Visual Planner was implemented with just end-user training and coaching on the tool. Our objective is to make sure that every Visual Planner user is getting the most out of it by the end of 2012>  

Additionally, CiM continues to perform seminars on the benefits of effective planning and scheduling all around the world. The seminars are intended for managers, planners, schedulers and supervisors and have been received with a lot of enthusiasm from all who attended. Please contact us if you are interested finding out more about the seminars and the possibility of hosting one in your part of the world.

Come see us at the Pulse meeting in March in Las Vegas. We will be demonstrating some of the new features that will be available this year at our booth in the Expo. Several Visual Planner users will also speak in the Pulse sessions about their Visual Planner implementation and the results achieved.

Regards,

Jean Charbonneau, ing.

President/CEO

Post date: 20th Feb 12