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Entering actual and budgeted units/cost

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Jose Ramirez
User offline. Last seen 11 years 41 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 6 Sep 2008
Posts: 105
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Hi Guys,

I need Help entering actual and budgeted units/cost for about 400 or more dif. Labor/Non-Labor/Equipment Resources.

BTW please don’t tell me to add a resource and put a plan start and plan finish date and use a standard distribution curve or a linear distribution on every resource because as we know that cost/hours work for each resource varies weeks to day/week/month and plus we divided our cost by systems. So, really this is a waste of time for you and me since I already know how to do this manually I am looking for something that would improve my speed in accomplishing these tasks.

Plus the curves in P6 are a very generic, not for real world environment, so you have to create your own manual curve. Our resource hours are kept daily for each project. So my problem is not planning of our resources because we have great minds (such as myself doing this already, lol)….

My Current method is to enter the Budgeted/Actual using the Feature Planning Method “Bucket Planning” which takes forever if the project has over 400 resources (plus I only have two, max three days to get this done). The File Below took me five days for the project below (dpf.) which had 400 resources.

I am starting a new project which has about the same or more resources. I have all the resource usage spread already in a very nice excel file (I created) which I use for all the projects I am involved with but I have to re-enter this information again into Primavera P6.1 manually which totally sucks and it drives me nuts since I already done this once.

We have timesheets but the problem is that the mechanical/civil/electrical engineers for Supervisors for each dept. do not speak English and are not familiar with Primavera. So, really we cann’t use timesheet which will do what I want but we do have a project controller that maintains all the project actual hours and cost on my excel spreadsheet.

We also have the API license, I would like if you guys who are head of depts. or know your way around JAVA or have developed app for Primavera via API for entering ‘feature budget planning’ could advise me on creating a file that would import my excel spreadsheet into P6. I don’t mean it like creating the java codes for me, is more on the lines of what I should included or be aware of the ups/downs of this methods, etc, you know. We have an IT dept. that’s very capable that could do this for me but I need know what I want them to do first or where this resource assignment information is kept in the oracle data base and how one can import or export this info via oracle.

Well, much thanks to all the cold provided a helping hand.

Merry X-Mas to all






Here is a sample of what my excel Actual Man Hour Report Looks like and the PDF file is the Budgeted Units and Cost.


Man Hours




Here is my Feature Bucket Planning Resource Spread for one of my Project:


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