Spotlight on AACE RP 45R-08: How SmartPM Supports Best Practices

AACE International's Recommended Practice (RP) 45R-08 provides guidelines for creating and managing project schedules to effectively handle potential delay claims. SmartPM directly supports these guidelines through its schedule analytics and automated project controls platform, helping project teams maintain schedule accuracy, track progress, manage changes, and ensure reliable documentation for dispute resolution. 

Here's how SmartPM aligns with key sections of RP 45R-08: 

1. Baseline Schedule Integrity

RP 45R-08 Recommendation: Establish a detailed baseline schedule with clearly defined scope, resources, and logical relationships to prevent disputes. 

SmartPM's Support: 

• Automated Schedule Quality Checks: SmartPM's Schedule Quality Index evaluates the schedule against industry standards such as missing logic, unrealistic durations, and critical path integrity upon baseline upload, ensuring schedules are built using best practices.
• Clear Audit Trails: SmartPM records every schedule modification automatically, creating a comprehensive and verifiable audit trail that supports accurate forecasting and risk mitigation. 

Learn more about SmartPM's Schedule Quality Checker.

2. Schedule Updates and Progress Tracking

RP 45R-08 Recommendation: Conduct regular schedule updates and detailed progress tracking to quickly identify and address schedule slippage. 

SmartPM's Support: 

• Automated Progress Analysis: SmartPM compares actual progress against planned, highlighting delays and identifying activities at risk of impacting the critical path.
• Proactive Risk Identification: SmartPM’s built-in variance reporting flags schedule issues promptly, enabling quick resolution and mitigation.
• Change Tracking and Evaluation: SmartPM automatically logs every change made during updates, allowing teams to track the impact of changes over time, model new scenarios, and reject changes that degrade schedule quality.
• Automated Delay Analysis: After each update, SmartPM runs an automated delay analysis that isolates critical path delays, identifies which activities caused slippage, and quantifies their impact on the project’s end date. It enables users to study delay trends across update periods and evaluate how logic changes, compression, or sequence shifts affect feasibility moving forward. 

SmartPM helps project teams shift from reactive to proactive scheduling. As Jaime Berzon, CTO at S.M. Wilson put it: 

“SmartPM is making us more proactive than reactive, which is funny, especially when you’re talking about a tool that analyzes your schedule. But we’re actually able to get ahead of things now and analyze things before they happen. We realized that if we can get in front of the schedule – build and analyze schedules better – they can’t come back and haunt us later because we’ll know we’ve built the best ones we could with the information we were provided.”

Kerry Lorts, S.M. Wilson's Director of Operations, added: 

“SmartPM has brought the whole topic of scheduling to the forefront of conversations earlier in the project, during pre-construction. Now, we’re discussing what true logic should look like and if there should be weather-related or other constraints built into the project.”

Read more about S.M. Wilson's journey to proactive schedule analytics. 

3. Change Management and Time Impact Analysis

RP 45R-08 Recommendation: Perform a thorough Time Impact Analysis (TIA) to clearly assess and document the effects of project changes. 

SmartPM's Support: 

• Prospective and Retrospective TIA: SmartPM supports both prospective and retrospective Time Impact Analyses – aligned with RP 45R-08’s recommendation for thoroughly assessing project changes: 
  • Prospective TIA allows teams to add and track a potential future change before it occurs – modeling its projected impact on the critical path to make informed decisions in advance. 
  • Retrospective TIA is performed in an as-built environment by inserting a delay and sending it back to the appropriate point in time to quantify its actual impact on the critical path. This enables a clear, data-backed understanding of how specific events affected the project. 
• Scenario Modeling and Change Evaluation: SmartPM enables users to model “what-if” scenarios around changes – whether planned or realized – and visually asses how they impact project completion, feasibility, and logic flow without altering the schedule file itself. 
• Transparent Record-keeping: SmartPM automatically captures and logs every schedule modification, forming a time-stamped, defensible record that supports claims, negotiations, and dispute resolution with objective data. 

"SmartPM takes data from the schedule and makes it easier to digest. The graphs and tables provide a clear understanding of project status, sparking conversations around critical tasks. The modeling feature is especially beneficial—you can explore various scenarios without changing the actual schedule document." – Kaitlynn Kimball, Scheduling Project Manager, KCG Companies, LLC.

Learn more about SmartPM's TIA and Analytics Tools. 

4. Documentation and Communication

RP 45R-08 Recommendation: Maintain clear and accessible project documentation and ensure effective communication among stakeholders. 

SmartPM's Support: 

• Centralized Schedule Repository: SmartPM maintains a centralized and accessible repository of all schedule versions, enhancing transparency, facilitating easy retrieval, and reducing the risk of miscommunication across teams and stakeholders. 
• Autogenerated Update and Review Reports: Every schedule update triggers SmartPM to automatically generate a standardized report summarizing key changes, delays, and critical path impacts - including automated schedule narratives. These reports serve as both internal communication tools and formal records for documentation or claims support. 
• Critical Path Delay Documentation: SmartPM identifies and logs delays affecting the critical path, including what caused them, when they occurred, and their quantified impact on the project completion date, forming a defensible audit trail for claims or risk tracking.
• Forecasting Delays with Predictive Analytics: SmartPM identifies and logs delays affecting the critical path, including what caused them, when they occurred, and their quantified impact on the project completion date—forming a defensible audit trail for claims or risk tracking.
• Compression and Feasibility Alerts: SmartPM actively monitors for excessive schedule compression, like unrealistic durations or aggressive re-sequencing, and alerts stakeholders when the schedule becomes infeasible. This allows teams to step back, reassess, and adjust before committing to an unachievable plan.
• Improved Stakeholder Collaboration: Customizable reporting and real-time insights enable project teams to communicate consistently, accurately, and transparently – bridging the gap between planning, execution, and leadership.

Explore SmartPM's Custom Reporting Tools. 

5. Claims Mitigation and Resolution

RP 45R-08 Recommendation: Use objective schedule metrics and maintain thorough records to minimize disputes and streamline claims resolution. 

SmartPM's Support: 

• Detailed As-Built Schedules: SmartPM automatically generates comprehensive as-built schedules validated by actual project records, ensuring accurate, defensible documentation that supports claims or refutes unfounded delays.
• Ongoing Critical Path Delay Analysis: SmartPM continuously tracks and quantifies critical path delay to project completion across all schedule updates. It identifies how much delay occurred, when it occurred, and whether mitigation measures actually worked, providing real-time visibility into the true impact of progress and recovery efforts. 
• Milestone-Level Float Path Analysis: SmartPM automatically isolates float paths to interim milestones, tracking delay, compression, and change impact on each milestone separately from the overall project. This avoids confusion when a subcontractor claims a delay to a phase milestone, while the overall schedule appears unaffected. 
• Subcontractor-Specific Delay Analysis (All in One Place): SmartPM breaks down schedule performance by trade or subcontractor, identifying where delays originated and how they impacted individual milestones or completion dates. This layered view prevents blame shifting and helps validate or refute subcontractor delay claims with hard data. 
• Objective Data Analytics: SmartPM clearly identifies and connects delays to their root causes, providing objective, quantifiable data to support resolution.

SmartPM users like S.M. Wilson have improved schedule conversations during pre-construction and built stronger defenses against potential claims, grounded in clear logic and verifiable data. 

Explore SmartPM's Schedule Controls & Update Tools.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Adopting AACE's RP 45R-08 helps project teams shift from reactive claims defense to proactive schedule management, and SmartPM is built to support that shift. 

From establishing a strong baseline and tracking performance, to running automated delay analyses, isolating milestone risk, and maintaining defensible as-built documentation, SmartPM brings the core principles of RP 45R-08 to life. Every schedule update becomes an opportunity to reduce risk, improve accountability, and avoid disputes. 

For teams managing complex scopes, fast-moving schedules, or multiple stakeholders, SmartPM takes the guesswork out of schedule management. It brings structure and visibility to the chaos, so your team can spend less time in spreadsheets and more time driving the job forward.

Want to see it in action?

Schedule a Demo and discover how SmartPM strengthens your schedule strategy and aligns your team with best practices.