Leveling question

Hi Ken,

Can you not set a leveling priority to achieve your aim? You could also impose some logic to force a section to start after another has finished.

D

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.

Hmm, you have me there. If you really wish to avoid WBS specific resources you could always separate out each WBS node as an individual programme and thus level within each independently and then combine them for reporting on.
Not ideal I know but is a quick solution.
Failing that, I’m with you - create WBS specific resources.

D

Ken,

Do you have 12 regions and 12 teams where two teams can work in the same region? The answer, I believe, is No. Your teams are allocated to a region so you need to do likewise. However, you could split each region in to a different project then you can produce the total resource profiles you are looking for. The other option is the one you suggest.

I hope this helps.

mark

Ken
You have three options:
Option 1.
Create one pool of resources by summing the availability of all 12 regions, and then do your resource levelling. This assumes that any resource can work in any region (probably not very accurate, but better than not doing any levelling).
Option 2.
Create 12 pools or resources using your BMA, BMB, BMC etc approach, and assign the availability for each pool. This will be a lot of work because you will have to re-assign all of your activity resources to the appropriate pool name. This should give you a fairly accurate levelled schedule for the total project.
Option 3.
Create 12 projects then open each individually, modify the resource availability related to the appropriate region and then level that project. Although this would work, it would result in the least desirable schedule of the three unless there were no inter-dependencies between the 12 regions.

Then, beseech Primavera to provide a resource "pooling" capability in some future release.

Good luck

Grant

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

What’s wrong with Solitaire?

Thanks for that brain-dump Ken. Was there are particular reason you did not use "Global Change" to effect the resource replacement? Using this method preserves the existing "Budgeted Units" so no b*ggering about in Excel.

(I have nowt agin Excel; I come from a Business Intelligence/IT background so lurve spreadsheets)

We often swap resources in and out this way when we need to make wholesale changes or even plagiarise an old programme - don’t reinvent the wheel.

David

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.

Ah. A labour of love indeed.

Regards

David