How do I accrue fixed material costs at the start of a task?

[mewise1]

My task is to assemble a machine. The machine piece-parts come in a kit, and
I need one kit per machine assembly regardless of how long it takes me.
Before I can start assembly, I need to requisition the kit from inventory.
Thus, I accrue the cost for the kit at the start of the task. However, I've
set the material resource (a kit, in this case) to accrue at the start (on
the resource sheet view) and I've set the task to accrue costs at the start.
Is MS Project having problems becasue it thinks the "kit" is a variable use
material?

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Your resource entry whould be "machine parts", the type would be "material",
the label would be "kit", the std rate would be the cost of a kit, and the
accrual would be "start." When you assign resources, you would assign the
machine parts resource at 1 unit and its cost will be charged to your budget
at the time work begins on that particular task. (Usage view will show you
when it happens, the regular cost fields only show the total impact and
don't indicate when it hits.) How does what you're doing and getting differ
from this?

 

[mewise1]

Thanks, Steve.

I wanted to use the task usage field "cumulative work" to keep track of how
many machine part kits I've pulled from inventory over the course of the
project. I could not get the work to contour in such a way that the work
would hit at 100% on the first day of the task and 0% on the remaining days
of the task. (the task is build a machine.) As I'm told, "work", even if it
is a fixed use material set to accrue at the start, can not allocate to 0%
during any portion of a task. Setting the work to 0% on that portion of the
task will effectively change the duraiton of the task.

You suggest using "cost", and that is the right way to track the total
number of kits I've pulled from inventory. In MS Project, cost is allowed to
accrue at the start of a task and will show zero on the remaining days of the
task. By setting the cost per material unit to $1 then displaying the
"cumulative cost" field this will indicate the total number of units I've
pulled from inventory.

My next question is about tracking inventory ins and outs (the question was
posted right after this one). But by reading some of the other posts on this
forum, I'm guessing that MS Project will not do what I want without
developing a production controls add-in tool. I may be able to get away with
setting up some macro to do the inventory calculations. Are there macros
that people have written to do this kind of inventory tracking?

Thanks, mewise1

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Work is a person doing activity and is measured in man-hours. It is not a
measure of materials and you can't mix it with material consumption. Doing
so is kind of like counting the number of discarded banana peels on the job
site after lunch break to determine the payroll cost <grin>. "Cummulative
work" is summing the man-hours expended to date. Hence it can't track the
number of kits because it doesn't represent a physical count of objects. An
assebler might expend 100 man-hours of work assembling a machine yet use
only 1 parts kit.

There is a big difference between tracking the costs of material resources
required by the tasks and doing inventory management. Project does fine for
the former but doesn't even recognize that there IS such a thing as a
materials inventory, much less manage it. (Notice when you put in your
parts kits as a material resource you can't edit the max units field? That
because as far as Project is concerned you have an infinite supply of them
and they're always there when you need one.) If your kits cost $100 each,
project can track how many tasks use them and come with a total number
required, the dates you'll use them, and how much they'll cost all together
but that's about it. IT won't show you when you need to order them, how
many you have in inventory, when you have to pay for them, or anything else
that an inventory accounting package might. The dates where they are
attributed to your budget are the dates where they have been consumed, not
the dates you pull them from inventory or have to cut the cheques to cover
their costs. If you think about it, from a *project management* standpoint
thats ok because your parts kit is expended only when it is installed in the
machine, thus the money it costs has only been spent when the kit is used -
if you withdrew it from inventory and then changed your mind about doing
that task, you could return the kit to inventory and you would still have
its full value in the "bank." Only when it's used up would you have spent
its value.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs