Leveling question

The reason I couldnt use a global change was because I had to change on resourse into 12 seperate resources. Boilermakers (BM) were origonally used for the entire project. What I needed to accomplish was to make boilermakers into 12 seperate resources. BM-A, BM-B, BM-C, BM-D, ect... Thus a global change wouldnt have worked.

Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, this is an overview of the problems that arose when scheduling a maintenance shutdown and the corrective actions…. Just bored at lunch break and though I would keep myself occupied by passing on my experience….



The method I mentioned earlier of how I went about scheduling a maintenance shutdown seemed to be a streamlined way to go about it (breaking the plant into several regions and having one crew of primary tradesmen per region). Upon doing this, there were several problems that arose when it came time to figure out the manpower loading and leveling. First and foremost, P5 is unable to level parts of a schedule, it can only level an entire schedule. For instance, I have regions A thru L. All regions have boilermakers (BM) and pipefitters (PF). All regions were to start on the same date and the intent was to have even loading for all regions throughout the entire project. Upon auto leveling it was very apparent that the regions were far from evenly loaded. This was because P5 took into account the entire project when leveling. This is where I turned to this forum for some advice. Inevitably there were only 2 options, 1) make each region its own project, 2) make region specific resources. The option I chose was to make each region its own project. Upon initial inspection this seemed to work perfect. Each region was leveled the way it was supposed to, and by opening all projects at once you can summarize them all easily and even run reports combine regions and do all that good stuff the PM wants. Everything was going great until the PM asked me what the resource loading was for each region. P5 only has the ability to add Units/time in a global manor. For example, region A had more boilermaker hours than region B. Thus region A would need more boilermakers to make the end date. So to do this I opened project A and went to the resource function, applied the dates and indicated that 12 boilermakers would be working. I then closed region A and opened region B. This region was only going to need 8 boilermakers so I made the appropriate changes and indicated the resource limit for B region would be 8, and so on to region L. What I quickly noticed is that when I changed the resource loading for a particular region (project) it changed all the projects resource loading to the particular number that was entered. Resources are a global entity and not project specific. So what I did was turned off the “show limit” and just let each project level out as the computer saw fit. This worked but I mentioned to the PM that this wasn’t a true schedule because by making each region an individual project you automatically made the subcontractors have the same number of crews as the number of regions. This is not correct. For example we have 3 crews of 3 guys for high pressure water wash (HPWW) for the entire shutdown. When the regions were broke out the program saw it as one crew of HPWW per region. We weren’t getting a true outlook of resources. After a few meetings it was concluded that the only way to truly achieve what we are looking for was to make region specific resources (BM-A, BM-B, BM-C ect…) The easiest way to accomplish this is to highlight all activities you want to change right click, go to assign and from there you have the ability to replace a resource with another. Unfortunately, upon doing this the budgeted units do not stay the same. So what I did was to export each region into an excel spread sheet, make the necessary resource changes in primavera, export the changed region into another spreadsheet, copy the budgeted hours and units/time from the first spread sheet and paste them into the second spread sheet and import back in the second spread sheet. This gave me the correct budgeted units and made it possible to resource level per region and will give me a true reading of exact loading of primary tradesmen and subs…. I know it sounds like a lot, but in the end it was worth all the hassle. The PM loved it, the clients loved it and everyone is a happy camper



Ken Barrett

A leveling priority doesnt really apply, All regions will start at the same time. In each region there are approximetly 2500 tp 3500 activities. to apply a leveling priority to each piece of equipment wouldnt be effective. All I would like is to level as per induvidule wbs levels.