First post in the forum, hopefully this will be the one that fixes my woes



I am using Project 2007 to produce a company wide programme. We deal in civil and maintenance engineering, and have a large number of jobs that are either fixed in terms of start/ finish dates, or are floating (currently unallocated dates).
To complicate things, we also produce many of our materials, such as asphalt and concrete and have our plant fleets of excavators, lorries etc.

The programme will eventually include all projects, with the aim being to include all plant, labour and materials so that we can level out resource usage- floating jobs can be moved so that they fill in the low points. For example, if we have a 4 week period when asphalt production is at 150% capacity, we need to buy in materials, and we would like to move the work to a place where there is (for example) 50% production, giving us 100% over the period instead of a high then a low period.

I can allocate plant and labour and use visual reports to give a result, but am stuck on materials. A job will use a fixed amount of product (say asphalt) but the time may vary- if we lay 500 tonnes of asphalt it may br over 1 day or 4 days, depending on the rate of spread, which is determined by various factors. Is there a way to make a resource for materials that will allow me to input the tonnage and have project spread it over the allocated time period?

Currently I am using cost as tonnage, with several different resources such as 200t/day. 100t/day, and then working out the time it takes to lay, and matching this to the actual period- not 100% accurate but close enough. I would love to find a better way to do this, that means I do not need 15 different resources and a calculator all the time to work out where I am.

thanks