Introduction to resources

Resources are the people, equipment and materials needed to carry out tasks in a project. You can create two types of resource in Asta Powerproject: permanent and consumable.

Permanent resources are resources that are not depleted by their use: when one task has stopped using a permanent resource, that resource becomes available for other tasks to use. Employees, machinery and equipment are examples of permanent resources.
Consumable resources are consumed by or supplied to tasks in a project. Consumable resources are depleted by their use: once a task uses 20 tiles, those tiles cannot be used by another task. Materials (for example paint and paper), components (for example fuses and bolts) and utilities (for example water and electricity) are examples of consumable resources.

Once you have created a resource you can assign it to tasks. You can combine a number of resources into an allocation group and assign the whole group to a task in one operation which is useful if you often assign the same combination of resources to tasks.

You can graph resource usage in histograms. For example, you could graph a resource's allocation to see if there are any serious fluctuations or if the resource usage is constant. Any over-allocation of a permanent resource can be flattened, or 'levelled', by the resource leveller. You can use histograms to help you manually level consumable resources by showing where over-consumption occurs and updating the graphs as you level the resource usage.

Consumable resources differ from materials - which can also be used to represent the materials and components required to complete tasks - in that you do not assign materials to tasks; you use materials to identify the type of task work that is carried out when modelling tasks in terms of task work without using resources.