With the release of Deltek Cobra 5.1.2, many new features have been added as outlined in our previous article Deltek Releases Cobra 5.1.2.
This article takes a closer look at Cobra’s new capability to load a combined activity and resource assignment CSV file via the Integration Wizard.
In previous versions of Cobra it was necessary to have two CSV files when loading resource assignments and activity data. These files had to be linked with a common code value so that Cobra new which resource assignments when to which work packages.
With version 5.1.2 you can create a single CSV file with a few extra columns to define a resource assignment and load this into a Cobra program using the Integration Wizard. We’ll walk you through the steps right now and provide you with some files to download and experiment with for yourself.
Activity Resource Assignment CSV Format
The format for loading activities and resource assignments is as follows:
Notice that a new row is required for each resource assignment for that work package. Rows 2 – 5 of the above sample will create a Control Account 1.1/MGT (Project Management), and Work Package 1.1.1, with four resources assigned to it with the requisite hours listed in HOURS columns.
There is also the option to load Direct, Overhead and G&A results if the values are available. If you have defined any resource codes for the project (another new feature with 5.1.2), these can also be mapped during the integration.
The Integration Wizard
The integration wizard’s Project Selection dialog now appears as follows and is sporting a new ‘Use one file with activity and resource assignment data’, and a field in which to set the path of said file.
The File Field Mapper dialog has also changed. You can now map to a Resource name and a number of result columns such as HOURS, DIRECT, FTE, GANDA, OVERHEAD, CAM and so on. Any of these not included in the Mapper will prompt Cobra to offer calculation in a following dialog.
In this example we are only loading the HOURS in from our Activity/Resource Assignment CSV file, so Cobra is offering to calculate the remaining results for us.
We’ve taken Cobra up on this offer in our little test here and selected all the unmapped results for calculation. In the field this is likely how it will be mostly used as generally only hours are passed over from the scheduling system, leaving Cobra’s comprehensive cost engine to do the heavy lifting.
The Results
We successfully loaded this simple project with resource assignments from the test activity/resource CSV file. Click the image below to see the details of multiple resource assignments to the Project Management work package.
This worked well in our simple tests and should prove a valuable feature to many organizations going forward. This is much easier to setup and use that the existing two CSV file method previously used.
At your own risk, Download this zip file of the sample data we used to test this new feature. You can use it as a starting point for your own test to load activity and resource data from a single CSV file using Cobra 5.1.2.