We just moved from a magnetic puck board to a combo of homegrown Excel and PEX.  PM me an address and I can ship you a metric shitload of pucks, complete with aircrew names dating back several PCS cycles.  

The pucks I've seen in AETC and AFGSC both arrived on a reel and you cut them to size, if that helps you order them.  

Here ya go.

PEX will do all of it, no need to combo, just takes an ass ton of initial work.

10 minutes ago, matmacwc said:

PEX will do all of it, no need to combo, just takes an ass ton of initial work.

I'm not in DOS, I just bitch about the product.  How did you learn how to use all the PEX functions?  In-house SME?  The 1wk training course?

Add:  a PEX guide or gouge floating around?

To clarify:  We tried using PEX for everything...entering commitments, tracking currencies, real-time updates displayed on a big screen as the executing scheduler threw 'pucks', etc.  The primary drawbacks were:

1.  Visualizing commitments and people available vs. lines to fill.  Physical pucks or Excel perform this function in a far cleaner format.  Even the attached flyers take the time to ensure those two methods of commitments are accurate, vice battling the daily PEX server meltdown.  I have 4 hyperlinks to PEX bookmarked...

2.  Constant inaccuracies in aircrew currencies.  I would show green in ARMS and whatever other program the HARM shop uses, but show red in PEX even after HARM/SARM tried updating it.  

 

Additional issue that drove DOT to create a separate RAP tracker:  Aircrew would log MARs, sometimes 2-3x, and PEX wouldn't save it.  I never had faith our RAP reports were accurate reflections of training accomplished, even assuming a 100% MAR completion rate from aircrew.  

Edited November 1, 20178 yr by Torch09

You have to get EVERYONE on board, I mean really drink the cool-aid.  WE had a helper to teach us to extract email correct schedules and whatnot, it was an asspain for over a year, seems to be working fine now.  TIMS or GTIMS is actually better, but thats a whole other ball of wax.

 

We also had WINPex and PEX, though I think WINPex is going away.  One was an APP on the PC, the other was web based login.

Edited November 1, 20178 yr by matmacwc

WINPEX seems incredibly slow at startup, but stays logged in over a much longer time.  EPEX spins up quickly, but will log you out after a fairly short period of inactivity.  As anything else, multiple pros and cons for both.

Somewhat recently we went from Pucks to 100% TIMs, to Pseudo Pucks (depending on your flight) and now considering our TIMs issues (network totally gone to crap) we may be back to Pucks.  Nice thing about old school, don't have to worry about network, windows 10 upgrades or other com crap...

Mat's statement is key: everyone has to drink the koolaid.  If that is accomplished, the PEX way works great.  I've seen mostly PEX in my career, and when I've gone somewhere where guys were adamantly against PEX, it was clearly because they didn't understand it well enough and were unwilling to go through the learning pains.  The end result is no less than 6-9 different excel products (of which not all ever seem to match), commitments and PFAs getting lost (causing scheduling conflicts), etc.  Despite computer upgrade pain and the occasional crash, PEX is actually a pretty good system if executed well/correctly.

But, puck boards and a GOOD excel product/commitment/currencies tracking system can be decently effective, but will always be monumentally more painful/time consuming for the schedulers.  Unless you have civilian schedulers now, then WGAF, make them deal with the pain!

Edited November 2, 20178 yr by brabus