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Assignment of productivity to activity type

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Evgeny Z.
User offline. Last seen 35 weeks 4 days ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Jan 2008
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Dear all,

I am just looking for functionality in Spider which i think must be there, but I can't find it.

What I am looking for is that there must be a way not to assign productivity of every resource to every activity. Especially not when you assign skills.

what i would expect, is that I would be able to mark activity to be of a certain type (e.g. digging trench, laying bricks etc). And then I would expect to for every resource to enter productivity for special activity type.

E.g. Excavator 1 - has this productivity X

Excavator 2 - has this productivity Y

And then whenever i assign Excavator 1 to activity type "digging trench", then productivity would be filled in automatically

Is there anything like that? 

Replies

Free text field. It is not used in any calculations.

Evgeny Z.
User offline. Last seen 35 weeks 4 days ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Jan 2008
Posts: 442
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Another question about productivity:

Unit of volume field - does it have any meaning in Spider for calculation? Does it affect any logic of math? Or is it just for information free text field?   

Rafael Davila
User offline. Last seen 17 hours 37 min ago. Offline
Joined: 1 Mar 2004
Posts: 5228

Very easy indeed!

But what I was suggesting is not to filter but to make the updates [VERY EASY] and then apply the formula on current Gantt to restore the values you want to keep because they belong to the few that are not to follow the norms.

activity-gantt-ref-VWUHA-1  click image and zoom

Trench Excavation_Summer Excavation was updated from 12.00 to 10.00 and protected value of 11.50 was duly restored, as formula restores only values greater than 0 no other values were changed.

We frequently estimate and plan using multi-resource productivities instead of individual resource productivities.

Say you have a Cut to Fill activity, several pieces of equipment will be involved [Bulldozer/loader/trucks to name a few] each with different capacity, a few operators, a few unskilled labor and a supervisor, the production rate is a function of the soil type, the crew composition and the distance earth is moved. If you only increase number of bulldozers and the crew is fully balanced production rate will not change, if you only increase the number of operators production rate will not increase but if you reduce to 0 the number everything will stop.

I love Reference Books and use them a lot even when my schedules are for different clients and do not follow a particular set of norms.

Best Regards,

Rafael

Rafael,

of course it is possible to filter assignment table and apply formulas to specific assignment types but using reference-books is easier and more reliable. Changes may be done for many assignment types and not necessarily by the same people who created and managed project schedules. Updating project model with the last changes in the reference-books is done by three mouse clicks. And updates will be done for everything that was changed.

Rafael Davila
User offline. Last seen 17 hours 37 min ago. Offline
Joined: 1 Mar 2004
Posts: 5228

Maybe you already figured it out: If for some assignments you want to fix Productivity then a simple formula can restore those you want to keep.

Prod   =   If (   A  > 0 ;  A ;  Prod  )
A = UDF FOR PRODUCTIVITY TO BE RESTORED

Yes, I wrote about corporate regerence-books.

If the reference book was added to the corporate reference books table then transfering the latest data can be done without opening any reference book.

It is sufficient to select all reference books and select Data Transfer ib the menu.

Reference books may contain any norms like resource productivities, material requirements per activity unit of volume, unit costs, etc.

Evgeny Z.
User offline. Last seen 35 weeks 4 days ago. Offline
Joined: 13 Jan 2008
Posts: 442
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Vladimir,

thanks, I knew these were reference books

RE "Any reference-book can be linked with specific projects and automatically updates project data when necessary".  You are talking about corporate reference books, correct? Very usefull

Rafael Davila
User offline. Last seen 17 hours 37 min ago. Offline
Joined: 1 Mar 2004
Posts: 5228

Consider exploring multi-resource-assignment-productivities.

multi-resource-assignment-productivities  click image and zoom

Note that because of the resource calendars with summer/winter exceptions I defined two multi-resources.

Yes, of course!

It is done by creating Productivity Reference-book where you can enter resource productivity for assignment types.

For creating and using reference-books you shall enter activity types and resource types. Assignment type is a combination of activity and resource types and is created automatically.

Any reference-book can be linked with specific projects and automatically updates project data when necessary.

To move data from the reference-book to the project select Data transfer in the Document menu and select project where the data shall be transfered.

I suggest to open one of the Demo projects (construction of 1 km of road) and in Project menu select Create standard reference-books. In the list select Resource Assignment Productivities. You may use this reference-book as the template replacing assignment types with those that are used in your project and entering productivities of your resources on corresponding assignments. Then you will be able to transfer resource productivities of typical assignments in any project with the same activity and resource types.

We always start project management system implementation with creating corporate regerence-books and typical fragment library.