Hello all,

What is your best practice in assigning both non-people resources (equipments, tools, instruments etc...) and people resources as work resources to the tasks in multiple resource assignments ? 

In addition to expecting your invaluable comments on that, there are some areas that I'd like to have your opinion as well:

- As we all know, MS Project does not make any distinction between people and equipment assigned as work resources. Total work is rolled-up sum of equipment time and person's effort in task level but these are two different entities. 

- In multiple assignments mixing people and equipment, there is no mechanism to understand what drives the progress; consider the two cases; -person whose progress in a task depends on the equipment (e.g. a machine & operator)- vs -person using equipment while doing the work (operator using the equipment). I believe that complicates the tracking process. 

- Let's consider projects where hundreds of rental eq. (i.e. pay rate is currency per term) are utilized. How could it be possible to assign hundreds of equipments, instruments, tools utilized as work resources together with people resources to the tasks in a project and then manage the project using that plan ?. I believe it would be very difficult to maintain such a schedule. How do you track equipment time in a large project ?

Thanks for any contribution to the topic.

Regards...

PS. You can send me email at projectuser[at]fastmail.fm for offline discussion.