Levelling resources and costs
Most resources, especially labour, are more cost-effective if they are used at a steady rate throughout a project. For example, it is more economical for a resource such as an electrician to be constantly occupied than to hire electricians for a number of individual, non-sequential tasks. Resource levelling is a process of flattening any over-allocation of resources to maintain an even level of resources throughout a project.
In practice, it is common to build up resources at the start of a project, maintain an even level of resources throughout the bulk of the project, then gradually decrease the number of resources towards the finish of the project.
Levelling resources automatically
In Asta Powerproject, you can level your resources automatically. Asta Powerproject can employ the following techniques to achieve an even level of resources:
- Delay tasks.
- Delay resource allocations on tasks.
- Split resource allocations.
- Reduce a task's resource allocation and increase its length to compensate.
Levelling resources usually results in tasks being delayed or extended in duration. Sometimes it is impossible to level resources without affecting the finish date of a project.
Levelling resources and costs manually
You can use the following techniques to level consumable resources and costs manually, to avoid fluctuations in income and expenditure:
- Reduce the allocation of a resource or cost that is over-used.
- Change the duration of a task that is contributing to over-usage.
- Increase the availability of an over-used resource or cost centre.
- Move tasks from a position where a resource or cost is over-used to a position where it is under-used.
- Delay allocations on tasks.
In Asta Powerproject, it is easier to manually level resources and costs if you display the relevant histogram that displays fluctuations in resource of cost usage. The histogram is updated automatically as soon as you make changes to level the resources and costs.
Resource levelling example
In this example, notice that the fourth task requires ten resources for two weeks, but no resources are required in the two preceding weeks:
By doubling the duration of the fourth task to four weeks, the number of resources required for the task is halved, resulting in a more even usage of resources:
It may also be possible to reduce the resources assigned to the third task in order to eliminate the peak in the histogram.
|
|
|
