Resource with Vendor Swap

[VJ]

Hope someone can help me with this, sorry i am posting it agai

We are using Project Office 2003 (SP3) and SQL 2005 database, PWA as our Time reporting too
When a new Resource XXXX joins, we create a new id and enter all the information (Email Id, Vendor, Cost ...) using Project office and we link this to PWA. This has been working fine with out any issues
Suppose if the same Resource XXXX after 6 months swaps a vendor, we create a new ID for the existing resources XXXX. We do this for our auditing report to display resource with the right vendor and the right hours worked (If we set up the existing Resource XXXX
with a different Vendor, the database doesn’t create a new entry, it updates the existing entry, In this case the audit report that runs doesn't differentiate the hours worked with new and old vendor
This is what we want to do. We don't want to create a new resource every time the existing resource swaps a vendor, Is there a way in MS Project Office where in this functionality can be applied.

 

[Lars Hammarberg]

Unfortunately, attribute changes are not timephased - changes made to
resource, task or project attributes will appear historically too.

This also goes for data in the OLAP database, as the cube building process
doesn't increment the fact tables, but re-builds the entire database every
time!

The absurdity in this is quite obvious in the example of a project attribute
like "open" or "closed", which could be used for filtering active projects.
If I today modify the open/closed field for a given project, setting the
field to "closed" (given it was "open" yesterday) - the project will appear
in the OLAP database as never having been open... even though the OLAP cube
of yesterday showed it to be so for the previous few months.

The only way to manage this somewhat without relying on customized code is
to create a reporting snapshot or archive an OLAP database.
You'll then have to build your reports against two or more databases (or
OLAP databases)

 

[VJ]

Thanks Lars for your reply

Do you have any document that talks about this. I came across creation of custom field will that help, If the above scenerio is nor not possible i just need to have a way to tell this resource was with vendor XXXXXX from mm/dd/YYYY to mm1/dd1/yyyy1 and from mm2/dd2/yyyy2 he is with vendor YYYYY

 

[Lars Hammarberg]

The simplest way I can think of right now is to create an enterprise
resource field of type datetime, in which you enter the "cut-off" date prior
to which you'll look for data in the snapshot table instead of in the
ordinary tables.

If you modify the vendor attribute for the same resource often or more than
once, you'll have to handle that somehow...
In this case it would probably be easier to use two fields:
attribmodified_date and attribmodified_oldvalue, both being varchar fields
in which the various changes are semi-colon separated.
Or perhaps something else - I can think of quite a few variations of the
above.

For the first of the ideas above, a report query could look like:

select resourceuid, vendor, getdate() as WithVendorAt from
msp_epmresource_userview where cutoffdate is null
union all
select resourceuid, vendor, cutoffdate from from snapshottable where
cutoffdate is not null