In this section:
· Work Centre Capacity and Resource Limits
· Work Centre Costs and Resource Prices
o Primavera P3 Resource Prices
When you create a work centre in SAP, you set up some basic information which describes what that work centre does and how its work is measured. In Primavera P3, when you set up a resource, you provide similar information to define the resource.
Weavecentrix Desktop automates the creation of resources in Primavera P3 which represent the SAP work centres used in the work orders that you transfer into your Primavera P3 schedule.
The resource name in Primavera P3 is an 8 character field. The SAP work centre name, also an 8 character field, is used for the resource name. The work centre description is used for the resource description.
Most organisations make sure that their work centre names are unique to avoid confusion. However, SAP does not require this. It is the combination of plant and work centre that is unique in SAP. If you have work centres from different plants with the same name, you need to make sure that you transfer their work orders into different Primavera P3 projects if you want to be able to perform resource levelling correctly. When the work centres are set up as resources in Primavera P3, only the work centre name is used to identify it. The plant ID is not used.
The SAP work centre capacity information is the source of information for the standard units for the work centre. For most work centres in use for plant maintenance, the units are hours. This is used as the units for the Primavera P3 resource that represent the work centre.
SAP uses a complex factory calendar system which does not readily translate to Primavera P3’s calendars. Each resource set up in Primavera P3 by Weavecentrix Desktop is given the standard default calendar.
In the SAP world, our work centre has 5 people in it and a daily available SAP capacity of 34.67 hours. The work centre’s day is 6.93 hours long. The capacity utilisation is 80%. This gives an available capacity of 27.72 with a maximum capacity of 34.67 hours.
The equivalent resource which represents the work centre in Primavera P3 has a normal resource limit of 4 and a maximum resource limit of 5.
On the face of it, this doesn’t appear to make sense. However, the key to this is understanding the concept of the Primavera P3 planning unit. All capacities in P3 are described with reference to the project planning unit. For these types of P3 projects, the planning unit is hours.
For a P3 project planning unit of hours, the work centre does have a normal capacity of 4 people per hour and a maximum capacity of 5 people per hour. This is because the number of people in the SAP work centre is 5. This is the maximum capacity per planning unit. The capacity utilisation in SAP is 80%. This means that the available capacity per planning unit is 4.
In Primavera, you control the number of hours available in the day by adjusting the calendar.
Primavera P3 describes the capacity of its resources in terms of the number of available capacities per planning unit. Note that this is per planning unit and not per day which is how SAP describes its capacities.
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SAP has a highly integrated costing module (CO - Controlling) that is used for planned costs and actual costs. Where a work centre is used in a work order, SAP has a number of different strategies for calculating the planned and actual costs associated with the use of that work centre. When you set up a work centre in SAP, you can create complex formulae for calculating the planned or actual costs which can include such elements as set-up and tear-down time or which are based on the work centre capacity.
The typical costing scenario used in Plant Maintenance applications is assigning a work centre to a cost centre. The work centre is then given an activity type which represents the work undertaken by the work centre. In the example shown here, the work centre PMMECHB has been assigned to the cost centre 4300 and the activity type has been set to activity type 1410 or Repair Hours. In this example, a straightforward labour type has been used.
When you schedule work against this work centre in SAP, the CO module will refer to a costing sheet for the activity type and cost centre which were assigned to the work centre. An example costing sheet for this combination of cost centre and activity type is shown below. Note that there are many different strategies for doing this costing. This is one of the more common examples which is based on planned capacity. It shows the month by month price change in SAP. In this example, for June of 2006, the planned cost for 100 hours is 5,069.05 or 50.69 per hour.
For a resource in Primavera P3, you can set up to six different unit prices for a resource which vary over time. For a typical plant maintenance schedule, a resource will usually only have one price set. In this case, the resource "Through" date is left blank to indicate that the resource’s price will remain in effect for the life-time of the P3 project.
