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S-Curves w/o Resource loading

3 replies [Last post]
Fri, 2009-06-12 11:03
Michael Walker
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I have built a schedule for an EPC project and the owner wants S-Curves (or general graphical charts) to show progress of particular groups of work (eg. foundation construction) against a curve generated by the approved baseline. The schedule is not resource loaded so I cannot use the resource curves. I was thinking about manually entering budgeted nonlabor units (arbitrary units based on estimated work required for each activity) and using the activity usage profile to generate the curve on a filters group of activities. I am worried about entering all of these estimated nonlabor units into schedule (just over 1300 activities) if there is a better way or if they will get lost or change when I baseline. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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Replies

Sun, 2009-06-14 18:04
#1
Rafael Davila
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Michael,

What you are asking I have done it in Primavera Suretrak, I believe with P6 you can organize your layouts either by Outline, WBS & Activity Codes. You can move from one to the other with ease, no data re-entry, no data lost, just a click of the mouse.

If under organize by Outline you can resource load at the outline level instead at individual activities under P6 as well as can be done under Suretrak then you can simplify your resource loading. It could be an approximation, but if you are not to use these resources for resource leveling it could do it.

You can use the lowest or highest level of outlining or even a combination. If you can do that, then I suppose you can assign resource distribution curves to get a better approximation. Thereafter you will get your charts as usual, just resource loaded at a different level.

If you prefer using your WBS maybe you can do so with the WBS summary bars. I have not tried this in Suretrak but could work.

You can try with a small sample job to see if this works and fits your ways.

Hope this helps,
Rafael
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Fri, 2009-06-12 16:58
#2
Marc Borburgh
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Joined: 22 Apr 2004
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Groups: Petro-Chem / Oil & Gas
While a decent resource loaded project will give you a realistic view of the progress in your project, creating curves based on duration is also possible.

You can have the number of activities per day be the weight factor to create the curves by 1 Global Change that adds a resource to all the tasks with a planned units of 1.
This way you will be able to create a resource curve on your project.

A very very dirty way to go about and not representative for your projects status at all.

The way you should go about is giving all the EPC contractors a list (xls) of their tasks and ask them to fill out the number of people that will be working on the task or the amount of labor hours they need to complete the task in the planned duration.
Then you can import those values and have a good and reliable s-curve.
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Sun, 2009-06-14 07:41
#3
R. Catalan
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Michael,

You can run periodic "Update Progress" from Tools menu to get planned % of the approved baseline.

Then manually extract the planned % of an specific area and calculate weight factors of each activity. Having the required figures, use Excel to create S-curves.

Hope the above helps.

Best regards,
R. Catalan
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