Customer Success Story
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)
The B Factor at SLAC Project comes on-line in record time thanks to Deltek Cobra™
The Challenge
The B Factory at SLAC was created to examine one of nature's great secrets – why matter exists. Designed and built by SLAC in cooperation with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) with $293 million in DOE funding, the B Factory is an innovative electron-positron collider that creates millions of short-lived B mesons whose behavior provides clues about matter-antimatter asymmetries. The project, which began in 1994 and completed in July of 1998, comprised two major construction efforts: a two-ring accelerator complex built by a collaboration of SLAC, LBNL, and LLNL, and a 1,200-ton particle detector built by a consortium of nine nations.
Before the B Factory project began, SLAC had neither a formal project management system nor the institutional processes and systems to support one. For scheduling, SLAC used disparate Microsoft Project® schedules on stand-alone desktop CPU's. This made it difficult to perform critical path analyses and allocate resources, which were considerable, in SLAC's case.
Actual vs. budgeted costs were tracked on Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets, which did not provide a true measure of whether a project was on-budget and on-time.
For the B Factory project to succeed, SLAC needed an implementation plan — a plan for the plan. This would require identifying interim milestones for infrastructure development (hiring a qualified staff, evaluating and purchasing software and hardware), developing an integrated project schedule (to include scheduling methodology and integration of the detailed system and subsystem schedules), and work package planning (time-phasing the budget and establishing accounting links and performance measurement techniques).
The Solution
In 1994, SLAC approached AIM, a leading provider of project management solutions, for help in implementing a PMCS for the B Factory project.
“We chose AIM because of its reputation for improving bottom-line results by implementing effective project controls systems — including project planning, cost management, and resource management,” says a SLAC spokesperson. After an extensive needs assessment, AIM and SLAC chose a solution that married two software packages: Cobra, a powerful cost management system, and Primavera P3.
The implementation procedure went well. The AIM team converted the stand-alone Microsoft Project files into a P3 database. Then, after ensuring that 100% of the scope was covered and that the network was logic-driven, AIM identified interfaces with other systems. The team developed a scheduling methodology to ensure proper activity coding for reporting and consistent use of calendars, units and resources for reliable calculations.
Because managing and reporting on cost was a critical part of the B Factory project, AIM uploaded this schedule information into the Cobra cost management system. Cobra was a natural choice; its open architecture and unmatched flexibility allow seamless integration with many schedule systems. AIM worked with SLAC's control account managers to plan work packages, establish performance measurement techniques and assess budget and obligation profiles.
The Benefits
“The Department of Energy imposed a very aggressive timeline for implementing the PMCS on the B Factory Project,” says Jeffrey Chan, an AIM consultant on the SLAC project.
The project controls team reached all of its milestones, producing the first set of reports from the PMCS in nine months. In October 2000, the DOE honored SLAC with the DOE Director's Award, acknowledging the on-time, on-budget completion of the $293 million project.
“The entire B Factory, both collider and detector, has come on-line smoothly and in record time, to the great credit of the machine builders and the delight of the hundreds of BABAR scientists now trying to cope with the flood of data,” says SLAC Director, Jonathan Dorfan.