If you are looking for ways to assign costs to activities in Oracle Primavera P6 without creating a global resource for every item, then you may find the Expenses feature useful. A project expense can be many things: administration, travel, consulting, software, facilities, training, you name it. The Expenses tool is also ideal for project-specific material items, such as custom built items that need to be identified in the schedule, but again, don’t really belong in the resource pool.
This article discusses the assignment of a project specific material expense to a schedule and shows you examples of how this is done in Primavera P6 Professional.
Primavera P6 Expense Scenario
The sample project is a straightforward heat exchanger repair project. We are replacing the damaged tubing in the heat exchanger as displayed in the schedule, Figure 1.
Figure 1
The activities are all sequential and have the classic Finish-to-Start relationship. Resources are assigned to all the activities from the global list of generic resources, Figure 2.
Figure 2
As part of this project, we would like to describe the large expense of the heat exchanger tubing that needs to be installed. As this tubing is unique to this particular heat exchanger, we do not want to list it as a global generic material resource. Rather we want to list it as a line item project specific material expense. How do we do this?
Defining a Project-Specific Material Expense
You can enter project-specific material costs, and other non-resource based costs using the ‘Expenses’ tab in the bottom Details area, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Click the + Add button at the bottom left of the screen. Enter the Expense Item name and the Expense Category, Figure 4.
Figure 4
For this example the Accrual Type is Uniform over the Activity, although you can accrue at the start or finish of the activity if required. In our example, the Budgeted Units is one. We are only replacing the tubing in one heat exchanger. The Price/Unit is the cost of the tubing, which for our example is $14,000. Type in the vendor name. We are essentially done! The only remaining task is to add a ‘Budgeted Expense Cost’ column and ‘Budgeted Total Cost’ column to your Activities view, Figure 5.
Figure 5
Now we have listed the labor cost, project specific material expense cost, and total cost of the activities and project.
Summary
Primavera P6 is a powerful tool not only for modeling project duration, but also for computing generic labor, material, and equipment resource costs. It also has a simple way to describe and display project-specific expenses, such as our heat exchanger tubing material example.
You can also use it for pretty much any named expense for which you do not want to create a resource. The costs of these labor and project-specific material expenses can also be displayed along with the total activity and project costs.