Basic Queries related to P6

Keep in mind that planning for intermittent work without disclosing the dates is useless.

Volume of work and materials quantities have different units, it is also important to know how materials quantities are to be distributed for consumption.

Usually most materials are locally available, but not always.  Construction on remote locations is not unusual.  I can imagine the construction of Sochi Olympic Village to have issues with materials supply. I can imagine some work in Alaska to have issues with materials supply. In my case this happens in the islands of Vieques & Culebra.

Even not remote locations such as NYC might have storage problems at the job-site becoming a delivery issue.  I can imagine how this was an issue during the construction of the Empire State Building.

Good scheduling requires consideration of all resource issues in a reliable and efficient way.

• If bricks are not available activities will be stopped and delayed until more become available.  The job is on a remote island and materials are delivered in limited quantities by barge every Monday.

1. How long this project will take after consumable resource leveling?
2. How long will it take if activities shall not split? 

• Cannot imagine an easier example for consumable resource leveling.
• So easy it shall be at a single click of the mouse if resource leveling techniques are working well and efficient with Primavera P6.

The following figure is an answer to question 2.

• I would like to see the answer to question 1 if using P6. It is no-brainier that duration shall be in between 20 and 32 days.
• If too easy to test software efficiency we can try with more activities that consume resources, perhaps 30 activities, 4 consumable resources and activities can be assigned more than a single consumable resource. We can model brick installation activities to consume, bricks, sand and cement.  We can model cement plaster activities to consume sand and cement. As soon as any becomes depleted the activity stops.  Easy, no material no activity.
• As an example take a look at the following delivery schedule with materials leveled.

• As time goes on things do not happen as originally planned and you must continuously check for best delivery schedule as there is only one ferry delivery per week.

You can try yourself a simple scenario, so simple it consist of a single activity.  So simple it is not about resource leveling but about resource production rates and its impact on dynamic schedules. 

Schedules are not static very rarely they happen as planned. A good resource model shall be able to deal with the following simple scenario.

• Activity 1 500 cm rock excavation
• Resource 1 production 10 cm/hr and works Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday 10 hrs/day
• Resource 2 production 15 cm/hour and works on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 10 hrs/day

If activity starts on Monday:

• Monday =>> Resource 1 will produce 100 cm
• Tuesday =>> Resource 1 will produce 100 cm
• Wednesday =>> Resource 1 will produce 100 cm
• Wednesday =>> Resource 2 will produce 150 cm
• Thursday =>> Resource 2 will produce 50 cm in about 3 hours
• Activity will take 3 days 3 hours.

If activity starts on Wednesday :

• Wednesday =>> Resource 1 will produce 100 cm
• Wednesday =>> Resource 2 will produce 150 cm
• Thursday =>> Resource 2 will produce 150 cm
• Friday =>> Resource 2 will produce 100 cm in about 7 hours
• Activity will take 2 days 7 hours.

Every time the activity is delayed, the distribution of work is shifted, when you have many such activities and work on different hour shifts, different days it can become quite complicated. For a single shot you can use incapable software with manual distribution of work among shifts for anything else distributing work by hand is nuts.

You cannot create a sound scheduling model without the consideration of resource productivities and its impact on schedule as things do not happen as originally planned.

There are other scenarios you must be able to model in order to create sound and efficient scheduling models, among them: consumable resources leveling, financial resources leveling and spatial resources leveling. A model that requires continuous manual adjustments to level such scenarios is by no means sound and efficient.

Let me know if you are interested in getting into the details of sound and efficient models for consumable resources leveling, financial resources leveling and spatial resources leveling.

• Without materials the activities are stopped until more become available.
• Without financial resources jobs get delayed until more money becomes available.
• The spatial resource is occupied from the first moment an activity from the group starts until the finish of all activities from that group. Spatial resources cannot be used by other activities until released by the group.
• None of the above can be modeled as common renewable resources.

Hi Tayyab

My experience is that resource leveling techniques are working well and efficient with Primavera P6.

You cannot create a sound scheduling model without the smoothing and leveling of resources.

Regards

Johannes 

Zoltan,

leveling works perfectly at least in Spider Project!

And in Spider Project you can assign and work with resource productivity.

if you have multiple disciplines then it is best to create a seperate resource for each discipline. But if you just have electricians just use a lumpsum resource.

Also leveling never works at least in P6 

Using a single resource when resources are different is lazy and worst practice.  You will not be able to resource level your resources in a meaningful way.

If out of 30 resources you have one electrician and many activities require that single electrician how are you going to figure it out if it is overloaded?

i) Production rates  can come from several sources.

1. There are standard production rate on this web site based on the item that you are installing or doing

2. You company may have established rates based on the history of the company which is based on how the organizatin is setup.

3. There are stnadard book like R.S. Means and NEC that give you production rates.

ii) If you apply actuals it will automatically apply progress to your schedule whihc assumes everything that was planned actually happend as planned. This will also update the cost and manhours data with actuals.

iii) you assign a rersource to each activity then you put manhours hours and or cost on each resource for each activity and a S curve is generated based on this data. Setting a target cost is called a budget and yes you can set a budget. EVM is where you earn manhours for dollars based on your progress. You have an activity with a budget of $100 now as you progress this work thsi activity is now 50% complete. Therfefore, you have earned $50(no matter how mych you spent you only earned $50 and you can never earn more that the budget).

iv) a quick way to assugn resource is to create a resource call it LUMPSUM. Filter for all activities that you want to assign the resource for. Highlight all of those activities then right clikc and select Assign Resources and select LUMPSUM. If your resource is set to 8 hours per day it will multiply 8 times your duration to give you your budgted hours for 5 days would result in a budget of 40 hours

A quick technique to expedit it would be to perfom the above and then export the resource and budget to excel. Now populate the budget manhors and costs in excel and import it back into P6.