Keep the scheduling rigour. Add governance, portfolio visibility, and a plan the whole team can actually work in.
Microsoft Project is a serious scheduling engine, and for a single planner building a single schedule it still does that job well. The problems start when it becomes the system of record for a manufacturing programme: one licensed user owns the file, the rest of the team sees PDF exports, the budget lives in Excel, risks live in another Excel file, and portfolio visibility means someone building a slide deck by hand every month.
In a regulated environment there is a second, quieter problem: MS Project has no concept of governance. No gate that can stop a project, no deliverable sign-off, no audit trail. The schedule says where you are; nothing says whether you should proceed.
Teams switching to Arcturus Pro typically rebuild their active programme plans in their first onboarding session — the WBS and Gantt tools are drag and drop, and our onboarding is run directly by people who have managed manufacturing programmes themselves. Most teams are fully working in the platform within two weeks, with closed projects left to finish in their original files.
If your bigger problem is spreadsheets rather than MS Project, start with our Excel comparison. For the governance side, see what a phase gate review should cover and our ISO 21502 guide for manufacturing PMOs.
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