Your company may have different pay rate schedules depending on whether your resources are working on an internal project or an external project. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio (EPPM) has a useful feature that allows you to define more than one pay rate type.
If you have only taken an introductory course to Primavera P6 EPPM, then you may not be aware that you can define up to five different rate types in P6. Not only so, but you can provide your desired name or title for each rate type. You could have an internal project that is defined by a base pay rate, which is simply project cost. Another internal project may be defined as project cost plus overhead rate and be labeled standard pay rate. And your pay rate for bid proposals named external pay rate may have a project cost plus overhead and profit pay rate.
Regardless of how many pay rates you choose to define, set your desired pay rate as the default and Primavera P6 EPPM will use this pay rate type for all new resource assignments.
In this article we demonstrate how to define a base (project cost only) pay rate, set this pay rate as the default, define resources with this pay rate, and finally assign these resources to respective activities.
Rate Type Titles
Primavera P6 EPPM comes with five defined titles for each of five potential pay rates. However, you probably want the ability to make your own pay rate title that describes your specific pay rate. Let’s create our own user-defined title for our base pay rate. Select Administer | Enterprise Data. From the resulting Enterprise Data dialog select Rate Types from the Resources group. Change any one of the five rate type field titles to Base Rate, Figure 1.
Figure 1
Rate Type Default
Now we want to set the Base Rate as the default Rate Type for new resource assignments. Select the Projects tab and EPS. Highlight your project, right click, and select Set Project Preferences from the corresponding menu. In the associated Project Preferences dialog select Defaults and in the New Assignments section set the Rate Type from the menu options to Base Rate, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Rate Type and Resources
Next we enter the Base rate for each of our resources. Select the Resources tab and Administration. In the bottom pane select the Units and Prices tab. Enter the Base Rate for each resource that will be used in your project, Figure 3. In our example we enter the Base Rate for each resource in the Total Engineering resource group. As displayed in Figure 3 we set the base pay rate of the PM Project Manager to $100 per hour. Note that this pay rate is effective January 1st, 2015.
Figure 3
Resource Assignments
Once all our resources have a defined base pay rate we are ready to make new resource assignments using this pay rate. In our example, Figure 4, we select an activity than select the Assignments bottom tab.
Figure 4
Next we use the Assign Resources icon to add each resource to the respective activity, Figure 4. If you change a resources rate type value use the Recalculate Assignment Costs icon, Figure 5, to re-compute the resource assignment costs.
Figure 5
Summary
In Primavera P6 EPPM you can define your own pay rate type with your own descriptive title. P6 EPPM allows you to title and define up to five different pay rates. Set your desired pay rate type as the default for new activity assignments.
Primavera P6 EPPM lists each of the five rate types in the Resources Administration Units & Prices bottom tab. Enter the default pay rate for each resource in your schedule.
If you happen to change a resources rate type value you can use the recalculate assignment costs feature to update the resource assignment costs.