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Storing of production rates in MSP

4 replies [Last post]
Tue, 2008-05-20 08:58
Rubas M. Kutty
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Dear Planners,

I wish to create a template in MS Project wherein once I am entering the Quantities(Or & Resources) of the Tasks involved , the Duration should suitably update with the help of default Production Rates of that particular task provided in the template.

Is this possible in MSP? Alternatively, can this be thought about with the inclusion of MS Access (as a database).

If anyone of you has attempted or are using this, could you kindly explain the methodology. I personally feel that should be possible in the ’calculative’ MSP. Hope to get some useful inputs.

Kind regards,
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Replies

Thu, 2014-04-24 17:43
#1
Justyn Scholze
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If you create 3 Customzed Fields (Units [Number 1], Units/Hr [Number 2], Hrs [Number 3]), you can copy and "paste special link" the Hrs field to the Work field.

Note:

  Tasks must be Fixed Duration.

  Customized field "Hrs" must be assigned a Custom formula attribute. In my case, "Units/Units/Hr".

 

It's a hack at best, and not very robust, but I hope it helps.

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Wed, 2008-05-21 09:07
#2
Rubas M. Kutty
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Thanks Vladimir & Darren,

I too feel that attempting formula based calculations might not be feasible with MS project alone. I presume MS Access could be used as the data storage(Production rates)& then can be suitably imported to MSP. What I wished was for an ’in-built’ calculation mode within MSP facilitating a drop down menu or a tab & listing the tasks and subtasks accordingly. That would mean quite a big library of combinations of tasks.

Meanwhile, I would try as per Darren’s suggestion.

Kind regards,

Rubas

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Wed, 2008-05-21 08:52
#3
Darren Kosa
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Hi Rubas,

It’s not something that MS Project handles well, if at all, to be perfectly honest. I know Hard Dollar have a module called BID*BUILD that integrates with MS Project and which might help (but it might be an additional cost that you do not want to support).

Other than that it may be a case of playing around with the Unit % and a combination of Fixed Units / Effort Driven task type.

Let me know how you get on and if you find a solution. It would be good to know for future reference.

Regards,

Darren
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Wed, 2008-05-21 08:35
#4
Vladimir Liberzon
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It is not possible in MSP because resource assignments in MSP have no special features (like production rates, or unit cost) - they are just intersections of resources and activities. You shall try to calculate activity durations basing on production rates using other software and then export calculated durations into MS Project. Maybe MS Access can do this. I did not try, because in Spider Project which I use these calculations are standard and production rates databases can be created (or imported) in the program.
Regards,
Vladimir
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