#1
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how to enter equipment resources
Hi All,
I've gotten as far as realising that equipment (for example a machine) is not entered as a material resource - rather, it is entered in the same was as a human resource, ie it does a certain number of hours of "work" each week, and it can be assigned an hourly rate (I assume the price to rent it, or the capital cost averaged over it's lifetime). The problem comes when I want to assign both a person and a machine to a task. Obviously, I want to define a task that takes a certain number of hours and requires both an operator and a machine. However, when I add the machine as the second resource, MS Project halves the duration of the project. I assume the problem stems from the "Effort Driven" default - so, how do I change this, and do I want fixed units, duration or work? Thanks, Benson |
#2
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It is weird, isn't it... how Project deals or actually doesn't really deal with equipment?
Uncheck the Effort-driven box. Also, in the Resource sheet, change the max units for equipment resources to a very low setting like 1% so it's effect would be minimal anyway. |
#3
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Hi Kimberly,
I'm still having trouble with this. The problem is,I also want to be able to reduce the "max units" on my people resources to a value less than 100%, so what I should see happening, is when I increase a person's max units value, the duration of that task should decrease (and vice versa), but when I add a piece of physical equipment, the task duration should stay the same. If I uncheck "effort driven" box, then it seems the task duration doesn't change regardless of, say, whether a person is assigned at 50% or 100%. But if I do check it, then adding a piece of equipment shortens the task, which I don't want. The problem seems to be that the effort driven and task type are set per task, not per resource. Is there a way around this? Also, you said I should uncheck effort driven, but what task type do I want - fixed duration or fixed units (fixed work automatically checks effort driven). Thanks again, Benson |
#4
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It is truly the pits. I don't know why it is the way it is. Some folks work around by entering equipment as material, but of course that has a different set of issues (no accounting for allocation). I would try setting the max units to very tiny. As I said earlier, you can check effort-driven. I would try to assign all other resources first, then uncheck effort-driven, then assign equipment. If you later need to make a change, check-effort-driven first.
There is no answer to your very good question, best I can tell. And many people have had the same question and it remains that MS Project simply does not do a good job dealing with equipment. You probably already have done this, but if not, do some searches and see all the Project MVPs (MS Most Valuable Professional), who have no answer for this either, just workarounds like set max units very low, uncheck effort-driven if you can, maybe make it material instead. http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/...equipment.aspx Bottom line is that Project does not see the difference between human work resources and equipment resources and treats them the same though obviously they are not. |
#5
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Hi Kimberly,
I did search for answers before posting, but didn't find the one you linked to. It was very enlightening, thanks. I have one remaining problem with the workaround though - if I set max units down to 1%, then the resources immediately show up as overallocated. This seems to conflict with what Julie said on the forum you linked to: "the amount of work will be very small but you can still see the utilization and check for overallocations" Am I missing something here? Is it something to do with the order in which I enter tasks and resources, and when I check and uncheck the effort driven box? I guess if physical resource allocation is not critical, but I just want to track costs, I could enter them as material, and give them each a cost per use, right? Cheers, Benson |
#6
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Hi Benson,
It's a few years on now but did you every find a satisfactory soution for this problem? On top of that, did you ever work out a way to filter available resources for any particular task based on a skills matrix? Just working through these problems for the first time myself and would appreciate any expert advise. Cheers, Mitch |
Tags |
equipment, resources, work |
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