Project Schedule

Scheduling is the next critical step of the project as it tells us the overall length of the project and whether we can complete the jobs within the planned duration of 15 months. Estimating the time for the activities is particularly challenging here because we are unable to approach all F&N employee at our convenience for the best guess of the task duration. Duration determination is therefore based on several documented case studies from FMCG industry, RFID reference books, internet resources, and our own experience. A number of assumptions are made in the preparation of the project schedule:

• F&N normal operation time: 8.00am to 5:30pm, 5 working days per week.

• All the planned tasks and activities will start AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

• Project kick-start date is Feb 1, 2011 and latest finish date is May 3, 2012.

• No major change in the company financial health that must postpone the project.

• No labor strike, vendor delay, equipment breakdown, accidents, or major bugs in the software program within the planned date.

• 14 days of Singapore public holiday are taken into account in the schedule.


Exception List:


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With the stated assumptions above, we decided on the task durations and its predecessors as shown in the Table below:


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We constructed our Gantt chart in MS Project 2007 based on the planned task durations and predecessor listed in the Table above. Note that the critical path of the project is highlighted in red. We need to pay attentions to the task in critical path as any delay will jeopardize the completion date of this project.

Gantt Chart of the RFID project

We also created the AON diagram in MS Visio to find out the total/free slack of the project activity as well as the early start/finish date and late start/finish date of each tasks. It is found in this exercise that the project has a total slack time of 20 working days. However, this does not mean that we can manage the schedule loosely and let the task slips its planned schedule. We will conduct the risk analysis of the project activities later. Some high-risk activities might need more time for execution. This part will be explained in the later post for risk assessment.

Critical Path of the RFID Project

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