In Primavera P6 EPPM, resources are great for assigning labor, non-labor and material generic resources to a schedule. However, if you have a subcontractor doing all the work on a task at a fixed price or you have a material that is specific to your project, then you may want to use a fixed expense to describe the associated cost.
Let’s say you’ve scheduled your activities, including relationships, and have found the project duration. Additionally, you have assigned labor resources to all your activities. The only outstanding issue is that you have a project specific material cost to assign to your installation task. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) Web allows for the assignment of labor, material, and equipment generic non-project specific resources to the schedule. It also provides a way to describe project specific material expenses.
This article discusses the assignment of a project specific material expense to the Primavera P6 EPPM Web schedule.
The Scenario
Your project is a straight forward heat exchanger repair project. You are replacing the damaged tubing in the heat exchanger as displayed in the schedule, Figure 1.
Figure 1
Your activities are all sequential and have the standard Finish-to-Start relationship. From your list of global resources you have assigned labor resources to all the activities, Figure 2.
Figure 2
You, however, would like to describe the large expense of the heat exchanger tubing that you need to install. As this tubing is unique to this particular damaged heat exchanger, you do not want to list it as a global generic material resource. Rather you want to list it as a line item project specific material expense. How do you do this?
Defining a Project Specific Material Expense
The secret to defining a project specific material expense is knowing which details tab to access to describe the expense. You will not access the Assignments tab that uses the list of resources to describe the allocation of generic resources. Instead you will use the ‘Expenses’ tab in the bottom details, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Select the + button to add a new Expense item to the Install Heat Exchanger Tubing activity, again, Figure 3. Enter ‘Heat Exchanger Tubing’ for the expense item name. Double click on the Expense Category column and then select the ellipse button. From the corresponding Select Expense Category dialog, Figure 4, select Materials from the list and click OK.
Figure 4
Use the column icon, Figure 5, to set the appropriate columns for your expense item.
Figure 5
The Planned Units is 1.0. We are only repairing the tubing on one heat exchanger. The Price/Unit is $12,000. The Vendor is Taco Incorporated. You are essentially done! The only remaining task is to add a ‘Planned Expense Cost’ and ‘Planned Total Cost’ to your activities view, Figure 6.
Figure 6
Now you have listed the labor cost, project specific Heat Exchanger tubing cost, and total cost of the activities and project.
Summary
Primavera P6 EPPM is a powerful tool not only for modeling project duration, but also for computing generic labor, material, and equipment costs. It also has a simple way to describe project specific expenses, such as a heat exchanger tubing material expense.
The costs of generic and project specific expenses can also be displayed along with the total activity and project costs.