Hello,
I am moving to a new company that plans to use the P6 schedule different than I am used to. The company is an Mass Grading/Sitework contractor, and plans to utilize P6 heavily for resource planning (something I don't have a huge amount of experience in). The goal is to track individual Pieces of Equipment and crews (possibly even individuals one day), earthwork quantities per activity, cost, etc. I see in the resource setup that the units/time for non-labor resources seem to be setup to use hours per day, even though we will be more interested in the quantity output (cy/hour, cy/day). Does anyone have experience with a setup like this? I would like to be able to put a fixed material quantity on an activity, with a baseline plan for the personnel/equipment required to accomplish the task, then be able to crash the activity by adding additional resources if the activity gets behind. Can anyone provide guidance on methodology, and any tricks/issues they have encountered? I realize this is a broad question, but I'm more interested in your general approach, rather than the minutiae. I've been through Primavera Resource Training before, but did not have this work scenario in mind when I took the course, as I was working for a different type of company.
Any responses are appreciated.
Best Regards,
Ryan
If Area A = sta 1 to 100, Area B = sta 100 to 200 and Area C = sta 200 to 300 the time location chart will be as follows.
The production rate of all teams are similar, limited by capacity of loader/bulldozer with adequate number of trucks. But each 100m segment have different volume of work therefore the slope of segments might differ.
Time location charts do not provide enough information to understand if it is desirable/efficient to speed or slow some production rate at any given area just to have the lines parallel. In any case in linear jobs it is good to understand progress at different sections, you need different views of the schedule.
The software shall help you plan the crews to make sure they are efficient.
if you want to track equipment separately from the commodity then the equipment should be assigned to the non-labor resource category and the commodities such as excavation can be tracked using the material resource.
so you could have 3 separate resource fro one activity
resource Type of resource measurement
Operator - Type of resource = Labor the units would be the manhours for the operator
Excavator - Type of resource = non-labor this would be equipment units could be 1 (this is so you can see how many you need and where)
Excavation - Type of resource = material the units would be the quantity of dirt in terms of cy to be excavated.
Or you can just have the material resource if you want to track how much you need to excavate and do not care about the equipment or labor involved.
Or you can just have a operator resource and track the hours for excavation (this can also tell you how many operators that you need and where)
its all in how you want to track this and at what level that the information get reported back to you.
You can have separate histogram and or S-curves for each of these type of resource
Production rates of an earth moving crew depends on:
If the equipment are not balanced some will be under-utilized. It is easy for an experienced estimator to make the calculations, it is common sense but you still must verify on the field and make adjustments in your schedule if necessary.
If you assign 4 truckcs production will be 900cm/day, limited by excavator. If you assign 3 trucks production will be 768cm/day limited by trucks trips per day.
You track crew production rate and if as expected most probably the crew is balanced if not it might be some equipment is missing or some is too much. Determining quantity of earth moved [loose measure] during a day is easy if all hauling is by truck if moved by the equipment then by making surveying calculations is how usually it is done.
This is done at the jobsite in some cases on a daily basis but schedule updating is not.
Eventually if the company have a unit costing system in place it will summarize what happened during the week, will tell you about unit costs and crew production per report week & to-date, perhaps late if short duration activity. Fortunately the language of construction people is production rate, the metric that gives sense to the numbers. For day to day management supervisors follow these production rates every day by hand/worksheet/abacus and it works better than waiting for a schedule update.
For a better planning I agree with Vladimir, you might need something better than the traditional CPM Software. Software that can dynamically select best crew based on availability and crew production rate, software that can adjust activity duration when a different crew is selected because the most productive is assigned to most critical activity at current conditions.
Ryan,
if you will try Spider Demo that may be downloaded from http://www.spiderproject.com/index.php/download/spiderdemo and will have any questions ask them at the Spider Project forum. And remember that Spider exports projects to xer, so they may be later opened in P6. Maybe it is acceptable to your organization. But it does not work both ways because P6 does not have fields for activity volumes, resource assignment productivity, resource crews, resource material consumption, cost and material requirements per volume unit, variable workload and many others. Exporting to P6 real life schedule will be transformed in accordance with P6 capabilities.
Best Regards,
Vladimir
Vladimir,
Thank you for your response. The organization I will be working for is pretty set on using Primavera, but I will definitely demo Spider to see what will work best.
Thanks,
Ryan
Zoltan,
Thank you for your response. You have been very helpful with past questions I've had (under a different user profile). As to your explanation, I'm not sure if I follow. So, you're saying to assign the equipment/tractors (currently have as non-labor) as a material resources instead, with the units/time being '1', and the budgeted quantity being the material quantity for that activity? Can you still track the cost of running that piece of equipment per unit of time (most likely per hour?) How would you also track the cost of the fixed material quantity, for example, concrete pipe? Would you add it as a seperate material resource?
Thank you for your response by the way. I appreciate the patience as I work this out in my head.
Best Regards,
Ryan
Ryan,
I am afraid that P6 was not designed for your task.
Consider Spider Project as an alternative that permits to work with volumes of work, resource productivity, crews, etc.
Look at http://www.spiderproject.com/images/img/pdf/Resource%20Management%20in%… for methodology of resource management in the corpoate project management systems.
Best Regards,
Vladimir
yes if you are tracking Quantities you can set up a resource for each commodity for non-labor make it material and make the default units/day = 1. Then assign the appropriate resource and the budgeted units for example lf of pipe, cubic yards of excavation or whatever it is to the activity.
The approach is to track quantities or commodities using a material resource with budgeted units