Weekly Hire Charges in Microsoft Project

[MSProjectNovice]

Hi,

I work for a construction company who have started to use project to create schedules, and I've started  some LinkedIn learning paths to better understand what project is capable of doing. One feature that is obvious as being useful is the cost function - I've so far put employee rates on an hourly basis, and material costs based on unit prices in the resource library, but I'm struggling with how to approach equipment costs.

The issue I have is that most (if not all) plant/equipment hire companies only hire out on a weekly basis. This means if X is used for 7 days, it will cost Y. If X is used for 8 days, it will cost 2Y, as the hire has renewed for another week.

Is there any way this can be conveyed in project? At the moment I have them set as work resources, however project then converts these to hourly rates (I think?) for calculation of total project cost. Is there also any way that you can say these resources can be shared, without project flagging an overallocation? (for example, one cement mixer would be adequate for say, three concurrent tasks)

Hope I've been clear in my post above, Look forward to hearing any solutions! :)

[#2]

@MSProjectNovice 

MSProjectNovice,
Yeah that's a bit tricky but there are ways to do it. Unfortunately Project doesn't have a day or week or month rate, all work resource costs are actually accrued by the minute regardless of how the Standard Rate is entered on the Resource Sheet. The longer they are assigned, the more they cost.

To get a true day rate (or week rate) requires some VBA code. As it turns out I wrote a VBA macro to calculate a true day rate for resources, it could be modified to calculate a true week rate. For reference you can see that macro at:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32067.ms-project-true-day-rate-for-resou...

However, for your cement mixer example, it's cost could be handled in other ways. Let's say you estimate needing the cement mixer for a week and a half. The mixer rents by the week so whether it's one week and one day or the full two weeks, you'll be charged for two weeks. If the period of use is broken down into weekly increments, you can use the Cost per Use field on the Resource Sheet. In this example the usage is broken down into weekly increments, one full week and one partial week, with the cement mixer assigned at 100% to each period. Because the resource has a cost/use of $100, each "use" accrues a $100 charge. Note the Standard rate for the resource is zero which will keep the cost independent of time.

 In this next example, the cement mixer is created as a Cost type resource which allows you to assign the resource with any cost to any task, again, independent of period of use. Here 3 slab pours are sharing the cement mixer over a one week period. Assume the cement mixer rental is  $100 per week. For convenience the rental cost is spread equally over the three pour tasks although the rental cost could be shown against the first pour with the resource assigned at zero dollars to the other two pours. Note, for a cost type resource, there is no Standard Rate or Cost/Use, the cost is entered into the Cost field on the Assign Resources window.

Now let's say the third slab pour spills into a second week. In this case I've increased the period of performance (duration) for the third slab pour and added an extra week's worth of rental to that task, since that task triggered the added week's rental.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

John