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Resource price change won’t show in cost loading report

5 replies [Last post]
Tue, 2007-11-13 11:18
Demosthenis Chori...
User offline. Last seen 12 years 6 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Nov 2007
Posts: 5
Groups: Civil Engineering
Imagine an activity, lasting 4 working days, which has a resource assigned to it. (I use this resource to track the daily cost of the activity.) This resource has a price per unit of 100 during the 1st and 2nd day, and a price of 200 during the other two days. For a budgeted quantity of four days the budgeted cost is therefore 100+100+200+200=600.

I would expect a cost loading report to show a usage per day of 100, 100, 200 and 200 (which is accurate and what I would need to show in the report). On the contrary, the report shows a usage of 150, 150, 150, 150 (600/4=150).
Is there a way to show in the cost loading report the true amount that will be spent each day for this activity ?
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Replies

Thu, 2007-11-15 02:51
#1
Demosthenis Chori...
User offline. Last seen 12 years 6 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Nov 2007
Posts: 5
Groups: Civil Engineering
Many thanks to both of you gentlemen.
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Wed, 2007-11-14 11:47
#2
Andrew Podolny
User offline. Last seen 41 weeks 2 days ago. Offline
Joined: 16 Nov 2004
Posts: 130
Groups: Petro-Chem / Oil & Gas
Kalimera Demosthenis.
This feature is implemented in P6 and named ’future period bucket’ planning. In P3..P5 to get the right Res/Cost loading you have to either split up the activity or play with S curve definition. Now in P6 you just manually type in resource usage per each timeframe and that’s it. Just like in MS Project.
If you will have any questions - feel free to contact me.

Regards,
Andrew
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Wed, 2007-11-14 06:19
#3
Oliver Melling
User offline. Last seen 4 years 30 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 595
Groups: The GrapeVine
Electricity and telephone bills should be added as expense items and it is possible to change the accrual type for them. However the options are limited to at the start/end of the activity or uniformally across its entire duration.

The default is uniformal accrrual and thus your expense budget for the activity is divided across the duration which is why you would end up with 150/day (as in the 4 day example).

You could create multiple activities with seperate calendars for the each phase of costs across the project with non working time for the days which attract a different rate, but it all seems too much work for the sake of a few hundred pounds of earned value per day!?
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Wed, 2007-11-14 05:53
#4
Demosthenis Chori...
User offline. Last seen 12 years 6 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Nov 2007
Posts: 5
Groups: Civil Engineering
Thanks for your time Oliver.
The example I mentioned is obviously simplified, and by it I wanted to show that what I see is that P3 multiplies each unit by the correct price, sums it all up and then divides the sum by the budgeted quantity. The division result is shown in the cost loading report and not the correct amount for each day.
Unfortunately, the activity in my project lasts for 1522 days and has three periods with different prices-it’s much more complicated than the four-days example! It is an activity I use to record the construction site every-day operation expenses (electricity and telephone bills, secretary etc.). It has a unit of "day", a budgeted quantity of 1522 days (the construction site will operate for 1522 days) and three different prices (low costs in the beginning and near the end of the project and high costs in the middle of the duration).
I’ve already broken this activity into three separate ones, each one with its own price, but I would like to understand why P3 does that and if there is a way to show the correct sums in the cost loading report.
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Wed, 2007-11-14 04:20
#5
Oliver Melling
User offline. Last seen 4 years 30 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 595
Groups: The GrapeVine
You can put each day in as a seperate activity and assign mutiple rates to the resource.
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