In terms of a recent agreement signed between Intergraph Corporation's Process, Power & Offshore division and Ares Corporation, Intergraph will distribute the Ares Prism Software Suite within the worldwide process, power, offshore and shipbuilding industries. Intergraph Systems Southern Africa has this month announced that Prism is now also available to the South African market.

The Ares Prism Project Manager software is tightly integrated with the Intergraph Marian materials and procurement management solution. Along with Marian, Intergraph Systems is now offering five modules of Prism Project Manager for cost, progress, performance measurement and tracking of engineering deliverables, as well as Prism Project Estimator for capital cost budget development. The Prism functionality ideally completes the Marian materials management and procurement solution with key project financial information and project capabilities.

Extending mutual value

Dr Richard Stuart, president and chief executive officer, Ares Corporation, said, "Prism Project Manager is a proven cost and progress management system now in use globally on major projects in the process and power industries. The integration of Prism Project Manager with Marian creates a suite of applications that are unparalleled in the industry and allow both Intergraph and Ares to offer our clients optimal project management through the entire project lifecycle."

Pat Thomson, managing director of Intergraph Systems Southern Africa said: "The addition of the Ares Prism software suite answers our client demand for project execution capabilities for Marian users. One reason that makes the Prism software suite an outstandingly valuable complement to our portfolio is that Ares products, like Marian, are developed in very close cooperation with our clients. This successful approach will continue to be applied in all Intergraph and Ares integration efforts to ensure that the benefits to our clients will be maximised."

Tracking cost, progress and performance

The Ares Prism Software Suite is a fully integrated set of project management applications designed to manage cost, progress and performance of capital projects. Prism Project Manager facilitates planning, budgeting, tracking, analysing, forecasting and reporting on the cost, progress, performance and productivity of all engineering, procurement and construction activities. Functionality also includes trending and change management, funds management, variance analysis and management of engineering deliverables and documents.

The Prism Software Suite is designed for 'single-source' data entry to ensure data integrity and is easily linked to corporate financial systems for downloading actual and committed costs and to commercial estimating, planning and scheduling software for integrating costs with project schedules and resources. Prism uses earned value techniques and user defined coding structures to allow 'time-phased' budget baselines and is suitable for virtually any size and type of project in any industry.

For more information contact Pat Thomson, Intergraph Systems, 011 313 1222, pthomson@intergraph.co.za