Problem with Material Resources

[milrock]

Hi Everyone,

I'm having an issue at a client that I am trying to work out by using
material resources but I am not getting the behaviour that I thought
as variable material resources seem to act completely the same as
fixed materials.

I have a client that has a two production floors (factories). When
each project is started it will use a certain percentage of floor
space is square feet per day until the project is complete. For
example, a project is using 2000 sq/ft per day over a duration of 50
days which means a total square footage usage of 100,000 sq/ft for the
entire duration of the project. But if the project is delayed to say
70 days duration the total square footage used for the entire project
would actually be 140,000 square feet. In Microsoft Project, the
daily consumption rate is lowered when the duration is increased. I
need to be able to keep the daily consumption rate the same then
increase the duration and have the daily consumption rate extend out
to the new duration instead of decreasing the daily consumption as the
duration is increased.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could accomplish this? Should I
just be using a work resource to accomplish this? Using a work
resource to track this will throw off all of the work numbers for
every project that has a floor space resource in it.

Please assist and thanks for your help.

Regards,

milrock

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

milrock --

When you entered the Units value for the Material resource on the task, you
should enter it as "2000/d" which would give you a variable consumption rate
based on the Duration of the task. I think that would totally solve your
problem. Hope this helps.

 

[milrock]

Hi Dale,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. I added the material floor space
resource to the task and assigned it at 2000 SF/d on a task of 50 day
duration and the daily consumption rate shows up as 40 SF/d so this is
definintely not working as expected. Is this a bug in Project 2007?
Can you try to repeat the behaviour that you described and see if it
works on your end.

Enjoyed your book immensely and have recommended it to over 20 clients
here in Canada.

Thanks again,

Scot

 

[milrock]

Hi Dale,

Please ignore my last email. I though that once you changed the
material label to sf/d it would apply it by day. I didn't realize
that when entering the actual units in the Assign resources dialog box
that you need to enter it literally as 2000/d in the units column. It
now works as required.

Thanks again.

Milrock

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Milrock --

Thanks for your kind comments about our book! If you are referring to
the Ultimate Learning Guide... book, you will find that I address your very
issue on pages 192-194. By experience, you now know the difference between
a Fixed Consumption rate and a Variable Consumption rate when using a
Material resource. Hope this helps.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

May I bring in my thoughts?
To me, material resources in Project are USED UP, whereas Work resources are
used during a certain period of time but they stoill exist when the task is
done.
In that respect, to me floor space is a work resource.

Greetings,

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf