How to handle vacation and daily business workload in cProjects

[former_member184588]

Hi,

we are planning to use cProjects for our ressource-management. The goal is also to take care of vacation and daily business workload. We would like to see that a ressource is not available on the specified day. Therefore we are thinking about a project with vacation and a workload and assign people to this project? Is there a best practice to handle vacation and the daily business workload?

Regards, Vanessa

[hanspeterbaier]

Hi Vanessa,

as Ravi said, you can maintain the availability via Tcode RPM_EMPDATA or with HCM integration. By integrating HCM the IT0007 is transferred to PPM-system. If you also need the absence (IT2001) you have to implement the BAdI 'RPM_PROCESS_DATA' with custom coding.

Have a look to this SCN-posting

With full HCM-integration you are getting a really nice overview of employee availability for your projects. This will help your project or portfoliomanagers to staff the projects successfully.

Regards,

Peter

[former_member184588]

Isn't it common to have a project like this for vacation? How do you plan your project without the information that someone is on holiday? How do you manage to have someone working only 80% max for one project because he has to do 20% of daily business?

Regards, Vanessa

[sammar81]

Hi Vanessa,

In resource Management in cprojects you identify the resources which  will do the work for you. You create a demand for them and assign them to their respective tasks. There is no linkage between vacations of the Employees to the Work they are being assigned to.

It still remains out of Project Management part of PPM and is individually handled in HCM.

Just to make it more clear lets assume you have a Small Modification Project.. Which Involves 2 Electricians,1 Mechanical Engineer, 1 Design Specialist  and 1 PM. Lets assume the project is for 3 weeks duration. 

Now you will create different tasks for this project in cprojects and You will assign these resources to these tasks. Assuming Electrician is required for whole duration and each day the demand would be 15 days and 100%. Mech Engineer lets say 10 days which is around 70% and PM is partially billing to the project so it can be 15 daysm but 15%..

Now system doesnt have an option wherein lets say one of the Electrician goes on a  planned vacation. It does changes your Project Schedule but there is no tracking of leaves here in C projects.. You can use Addition resources or soft locking options to cater for these kind of risks... It still remains a Project Management Activity out of the system ( PPM).

Hope it clears your doubts.. Lets wait for other experts as well on this...

Cheers

Sammar

[former_member184588]

Hi Sammar,

thanks a lot for your answer. This helps.

I have seen that my question is not really clear and therefore I would like to make it more concrete.

I am searching for a possibility to see - during staffing - that an employee is not available on several days. I don't care about the reason the ressource is not available but need to see this that the ressource is not available. If the worker is assigned to another task the demand is clear because it is handled within cProjects. But what about blocking of ressources (i.e. vacation) because this happens in an external system / HCM module? (Therefore I was thinking about to create a project for vacation and plan there the absences of my workers (because of vacation and other reasons). But is it not possible out-of-the-box to specify that the worker is not available on several days because I would setup a task for vacation and would need to assign him on several days and not only for a given time range.) Am I right with this assumption?

Also for the ressource planning: Sorry but I don't get the point with your answer (surely because I am not deep enough into the topic). How is it possible to have a project (lets call the task "daily business") and assign several ressources 25% to this tasks? I need to distribute the demand to several days. For example there is a worker that is using 25% for his daily time for training. In this time he is not available for other tasks. Therefore I would like to create the task, assign him to the task and cProjects should take the demand (8hrs / week) and split it into an demand of 2hrs / day. In this way I can block a ressource for everyday and in the ressource planning I see that he is only available 6hrs because there is already the demand of 2hrs on a daily base.... It this possible?

Regards, Vanessa

[sammar81]

Hi Vanessa,

Once you assign a Resource to a task within Cprojects you can assign him partially or fully. let's say person is working 2 days  out of 5 on Project A and 3 days in Project B.

Within this division also you can specify that out of these 2 days he works 8 hours in Project A and rest in project B or maybe he is free for 4 hours for some extra work. You need to explore the Resource Management part of PPM. This is all standard Functionality.

For Getting a view of whether your resource is available for a particular project considering his vacations into account needs verification, I don't think it is available in PPM/HCM integration.. What you have suggested can work as a workaround solution.. But would be a good amount of work.. to keep creating dummy projects for resource management.. or one general project with multiple tasks..

I think in MRS this functionality is available.  

Hope it makes some sense now..

Cheers

Sammar

[ravi_ekambaram]

Hi Vanessa,

As far as PPM is concerned, there is no integration available for integrating 'Availability' (infotype 2004, 2003, 2002 & 2001) from HCM system. If you are integrating Multi-resource Scheduling with PPM, then all these infotypes with 007 also can be used for displaying the availability of resources.

In PPM, there is an option to put these data but in a different way. Any resource in PPM can be maintained with status active/inactive & availability (In hrs/day) direclty for a particular period. As a PPM administrator, the availability can be maintained directly or it can be location based also.

These data maintenance can be done either in PPM application directly (in Portfolio & project administration-Edit resource) or in SAP GUI tcode - RPM_EMPDATA.

Hope this helps & meets your requirements.

Regards,

Ravi