equipment as a work resource

[andrewandrew]

Is there a way that I can assign a work resource to a task without increasing
the work (worker-hours) of that task? For example, say there is only one
crane on a large industrial project. It is important to be able to use
resource-levelling tools for that crane, so that it's not scheduled to be in
two places at once, so I want to assign the crane to tasks as a work
resource. Say the crane is necessary on an 8 hour task that has three workers
assigned to it, for a total of 24 worker-hours. When I assign the crane and
keep the duration the same, the work calculation includes the crane for a
total of 32 hours. How can I exclude the crane from the work calculation,
while still taking advantage of load levelling, max units, and resource
over-allocation functionality?

Andrew

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Andrew,

Since Leveling uses Work to recalculate the schedule, you can't have no work
but still have leveling.
My advice is that you create a column showing what you want for instance use
a cost column with 1? as cost for the human resources and 0 for the crane.
A VBA procedure could write the same value to a custom duration field.

But natively, no, sorry

HTH

 

[andrewandrew]

That's what I was afraid of. Oh well, thanks for the quick reply!

Andrew

Comment: what a simple thing to have left out! I bet tens of thousands of
people would benefit from this kind of functionality.

 

[vikas]

This could be a very late reply, but with a possible solution.
Will creating a parallel task and assigning the resource crane to that task
help? That way work by the crane and work by the 3 resources will be
segregated and could be analysed / accounted separately.

Vikas Kirtani
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

Yes but this leads to the question of having parallel tasks.
Hammock tasks work up to a certain point.
HTH