Resource Levelling

Paula,

If I am understanding this correctly then I would remove the crane as the resource from all activities then place a new task (Hammock) within the required units for "Crane Useage" hammocking between the required 1st & second units. The duration of which will determine the required days of crane requirment / unit. You may also set milestones alongside these hammocks for crane moves "Starts" & "Finishes". The filter on the hammocks will be the "Crane Useage" schedule and show Crane moves as a milestone plan.

Whilst the crane is on a location it will be charged at a day rate irrespective of use on a task - so I think that the above will be ok for a "Crane Plan" ?

Regards, JF.

Hi Paula,

do you really need to level it? If not, as long as you load the resource to the correct activities and your schedule is properly sequenced as you explained, then you will see that the crane is available when you need it.

If you really need to level it, my view is to use resource calendars. After leveling, you can assign non work to resource calendar to the crane for the days you will dismantle the crane. Then level it again to see the schedule impact.

Hope this helps.

Se

The secret to keeping the crane in the same area is to include area in your priorities when you level. Good luck!

Thank you all for the great advice! We are going to try to see if we can avoid levelling, as it is causing more problems than we expected. I am going to try to level by hand and that way I can control the placement of the cranes.

Does everyone else have problems with levelling in Primavera? It is difficult to understand sometimes why the program chooses to do one thing over another, which is then hard to justify it’s choices when explaining the schedule to another party. How do you get around this issue?

Paula

Yup, it’s a pain levelling. I produce the plan ’normally’ see how it looks and then level it and see how it looks again. Usually I manually level things by adjusting the start/finish dates. Not ideal but as you so rightly say, P3’s levelling often causes more problems than it solves.

Priority is a good way of trying to get things to stay where you think they should. But it is stil a case of suck it and see...

Cheers

Nige

ALL,

Beg to differ. Levelling is key for all of my customers, who must predict resource requirements with great accuracy and properly smoothed. P3 is as good a leveller as I have used. I would guess that 80%+ of my client’s networks are levelled.

To get the most out of it you need:

Minimum CPM logic - only what is genuinely required for contstruction. Ask yourself if there would be any difference in the relationships in your CPM network if you had unlimited resources, unlimited budget, and no "preferences" about which work to do first.

A priority coding system. - Probably more than one. Of course the less CPM logic, the more important this "tie break" code is. The P3 default of late start, total float is a great default - but usually if you read the contract you find out what the real project imperatives are.

Realistic number of resources to level. - the more resources you level, the harder it is to figure out what is going on.

REMEMBER resource leveling is a non-parametric, polynomial incomplete problem. I.E. its a guess. The best guess is better than no guess at all.

David,

But how do you respond to your customer when they ask why an activity is somewhere, or why the program has placed one activity before another? It does not seem sufficient to say "well the computer told me".

Also, do you follow these levelled schedules or do you use them to build a new schedule from?

One last thing, what type of business are you in? What type of product do you produce that levelling works for you? I would love to get levelling to work, but there always seems to be too many things to guess on or questions after Primavera has levelled.

Paula,


Well, with a user defined set of resource levelling parameters, the "computer" puts the activity where YOU told it to!

I accept that answer may seem a little facetious.

Individually checking where each activity has been placed is enormously time consuming (thats why we use computers), drawing a "level delay" bar to show which activities have been moved by how much is helpful.

80% of my time I work in an offshore engineering environment, where labor costs are huge, and resource availability only a fraction of what would be ideal. If we were allowed unlimited men, we could do the job in a week. But with the limits we have that time goes up by a factor of anything up to 10.

David,

Your "leveled day" chart sounds fascinating. Can you describe this in more detail?

all,

Its a little more complicated in P5 than the old P3 3.1, since P3 3.1 let you draw a bar between two start points.

Effectivley I want to draw a bar for each activity, that joins the CPM early start, with the resource levelled start. This bar is drawn in the same row height as the "Remaining work" bar, and drawn before it on the list of bars in the layout. Therefore when the project is Scheduled, this bar is not seen as it is submarined under the "Remaining work" bar. But when you Level the plan a thin differently coloured bar shows the level delay from the original early start to the current levelled start.


To do this you need to have the "preserve scheduled early and late" dates option on in the resource levelling options.

After levelling the plan, run a global change to set:

User start date x = Early start, and
user end date x = start

Draw a bar between user start date x and user end date x.

Now the level delay of each activity is graphically drawn.

Have fun! :)

Hi David

Long time no speak. Trust all is well with you.

That’s a really neat idea.

Cheers