Kahua launched Schedule Manager on Oct. 14, an application that pulls project schedules into its owner-side construction platform and ties activities to contracts and the schedule of values, so approved schedule progress can inform payment requests. It’s available now to all Kahua customers. The Alpharetta, Ga., company didn’t publish pricing.
Kahua sells mostly to owners and program managers running capital programs in government, healthcare, education and energy. That’s who this is for. Schedule Manager doesn’t replace a scheduler’s CPM tool. It brings the schedule to everybody else on the program.
What Kahua Schedule Manager does
According to the company’s announcement, teams can import schedules from tools like Oracle’s Primavera P6, build configurable lookahead views and compare revisions against approved baselines. Activities can be linked to Kahua records, including RFIs, submittals, punch list items and daily reports. The pitch is that a reviewer can see an open RFI sitting on a critical activity before anyone changes the official schedule.
The one early user quoted is David Dwyer, a capital program and asset management solutions manager at Parsons Corp. He said linking Kahua records to the exported schedule ends the need to maintain the same information across Kahua, P6 and Excel. That’s a real cost on big programs, where a scheduler, a cost engineer and a document controller often keep three versions of the truth.
What the release doesn’t say matters too. It describes importing from P6. It doesn’t say whether anything flows back. If a linked RFI pushes an activity, the scheduler presumably still makes that change in P6 and reimports. Expect that question in every demo.
Schedule-driven payment requests
The schedule of values link is the feature with teeth. Tying approved schedule progress to payment requests could make pay apps less of a negotiation, since both sides look at the same activity percentages. It could also slow them down, because a disputed activity now holds up money as well as dates.
Subcontractors should watch how owners configure it. Most already float payroll while pay apps clear, and a schedule gate on progress billing is one more approval between the work and the check. Owners who set it up well will pay faster. Owners who use it as a brake won’t.
Where Kahua’s scheduling tool fits
Kahua frames the problem with McKinsey’s widely cited estimate that large projects run 30% to 45% over budget and schedule, and blames the gap between schedules and day-to-day execution. That’s a fair diagnosis and an old one. Software vendors have been trying to connect the schedule to everything else for a while. A different approach showed up this month when CupixWorks 5.0 started pulling P6 schedules into site scans. The P6 import is the only thing the two share. Cupix ties the schedule to captured site conditions, and Kahua ties it to contracts and records.
Kahua’s version has the advantage of already sitting where owners keep the contract and cost data. The test is whether field teams update linked records honestly enough for the payment logic to trust them. A shared view only helps if the activities feeding it are current.