If you run correspondence, transmittals, and submittals on a construction or EPC project, you've almost certainly used — or been told to use — Oracle Aconex. It's capable and widely mandated. But two things push teams to look for an alternative: the enterprise price tag, and the fact that your project's documents live in Oracle's cloud, not yours.

Deltek Acumen Fuse earned its place as the industry standard for schedule diagnostics. But if you're a planner or a small consultancy, you've probably hit its two walls: desktop installation (IT approval, license servers, Windows-only) and enterprise pricing (thousands per seat, per year).

Here's an honest comparison with a browser-based alternative.

Schedules submitted to major Gulf owners — Saudi Aramco, Qatar's Ashghal, and the big regional PMCs — get scrutinized hard. Programme reviewers in the GCC lean on the same schedule-quality fundamentals as DCMA, plus a few regional realities that catch out planners who bring a "template" schedule from elsewhere.

Here's what to check before you submit.

If you submit programmes to a government client, an EPC, or any owner with a real project-controls team, your schedule will sooner or later be scored against the DCMA 14-point assessment. Knowing the 14 metrics — and checking them before you submit — is the cheapest credibility you can buy as a planner.

Here's the short version of all 14 points, with the thresholds most reviewers apply.

You've been sent a .xer file — a subcontractor's programme, a claim submission, a baseline for review — and you don't have a Primavera P6 license on this machine. What are your options?