Damien said:
I have a project need to schedule the forestry operations of establishing a
plantation.
Basically I have resources that such as harvestor, Wilco etc and I have a
fixed area that needs work done.
For example,
I have plantaiton of 40 Hectares in area. I then assign resources of 2
harvestors each couple of harvesting 1 Hectare / day. Therefore the duration
should be 20 days.
How can I set this up in Project?
For example if I add another 2 harvestors it will now only take 10 days.
I can only see rates / cost which I will also want to track but no where
where I can set the 1 hectare / day rate?
Cheers
Damien
Damien,
First, be advised that although Project does have some material handling
capabilities it really works best when dealing with labor type resources.
Nonetheless, here is one scheme that will work. First you need to make a
mental conversion of field area into work effort so we will assume that
each hour is one Hectare.
1. Go to Tools/Options/Calendar tab and set the default hours per day to
be "1". This will align the Duration field with the "work" effort of
each resource (i.e. harvestor).
2. Go to Tools/Options/Schedule tab and set the task type to be "fixed
work". This basically says that the field size (which remember is now
Hectacres not hours) will be fixed.
2. Go to the Resource Sheet and set up a work resource of "harvestors".
Give it a max unit level of the total number of harvestors you have
available. This will give you an overallocation flag if you try to
assign more harvestors than you have.
3. Enter the standard rate for each harvestor (e.g. $100/d). Note that
you can also enter a Cost/Use value if there is a fixed cost associated
with using a harvestor for each field (e.g. transport to each field)
4. You might also want to add a consumable resource such as fuel to the
resource sheet. Identify it as a "material" type resource with a
material label such as "gallons" and a material rate (e.g. $3/gal).
5. Now on the Gantt Chart, enter your tasks (e.g. harvest field 49,
harvest field 50, etc.), along with the field sizes in the Work field
(i.e. a 40 Hectacre field is represented by 40 hours). Here is where you
could re-label the Work field to show it as Hectacres although the "hrs"
label will still be shown with each value. This could be eliminated by
using a formula in a spare field but that's an exercise for another day.
6. As you assign resources (harvestors and fuel) you will see two things
happen. First, you will see the duration change in response to how many
harvestors you have working and you will see the Cost field change as
those resources are assigned.
This is just one way to set it up. The problem with this method is that
if you also plan to include labor effort, things will get messed up
because labor does work on an hourly basis but the hours per day has
been re-defined.
Hope this helps and have fun.
John
Project MVP
