Help for engineers and managers planning TETRA deployments is offered by Solvum Software Solutions, which demonstrated its powerful Site Tracker tool. “Site Tracker is a special kind of project management tool for rollout projects”, explains Patrick Maurer.

But radio projects are just one of its applications, he says. “It’s also for security, business or IT rollouts, hardware rollouts, software rollouts – any kind of distribution where you have the same or similar activities on many sites – and this is the main focus of Site Tracker. We have time scheduling, incident management, system configuration, and, of course, status overview, to have an overview of how is the progress of my project, and so on. This is all covered in one application.

“It is fully customizable, so there’s no need for us to do the customization. So the project team can set up their own structures: that means they can set up their own fields, field kinds, groupings and so on, and of course reporting.”

Progress bars

Launching a brief demonstration, Mr Maurer runs through the project management features, highlighting sites where you have to deliver or install something; grouping levels, such as regional groupings; status dashboard displays; progress bars representing activities, timescales and project milestones.

“You define once a time schedule template and you map this template on several sites – hundreds or thousands of sites with the same template”, he says. “The template consists of activities, milestones and dependencies between them, like you know from MS Project, for example.

“It’s also possible to administer incidents. There is no roll-out which doesn’t have problems or incidents – in huge projects you have these problems – and so you can directly switch to the incident manager. You put in the incident details: ‘What’s the problem? When do you think it will be finished?’ And the target date is put in here automatically in the forecast planning.”

If the incident is likely to affect the schedule, the background on the screen changes to orange or red, to draw attention to it.

‘Nothing else like it’

First developed in 2002 as a project for Nortel Networks, Site Tracker has since been employed by many customers in telecommunications – in particular, Cassidian, which uses it in the BOSnet project in Germany, for a border surveillance project in Romania and for systems in the Middle East. Other customers have used it for IT deployments – Commerzbank in Germany is one.

“We think there is nothing else on the market like Site Tracker, and this is what our customers also say”, Mr Maurer adds. “Often we have the situation where they tell us they were searching a long time for such a tool. Very often we have a situation where they made a custom development, like Nortel did many years ago – but the problem is it’s very expensive to develop, and you have the situation where you always must upgrade. There is a need for additional functionality. And therefore we have many pros for a product which is established. We have upgrades about three or four times a year.”