Material Costs Per Unit

Question

Hello All,

I am currently working for a Solar Panel Developer and we are trying to implement Microsoft Project across our sites to use for tracking construction tasks.

On that note there are several items that need to be procured and arrive on several dates. As those items arrive, I want to set up tasks so that they reflect when they should be paid by. I have been able to do this by using a series of tasks and Milestone...I.e. Panels Delivered as a Milestone on August 1st and then a task after that that says Panel Payment with a duration of 30 days with its predecessor being Panels Delivered. I should also note that I assigned the task Panel Delivered with a resource named "Panel Manufacturer". First of all is there a better way of doing this?

More importantly, what my accounts team would like is if I could then associate the Panel Payment with an actual cost they could indicate how much they have to pay at that date. I played around a bit with the resource sheet and realized that I could state the assigned resource as a material but I dont understand how to associate a cost per unit for that resource.

I would like to be able to either input a direct full cost with that item, or be able to input for example a rate such as $/kW and then put in the number of kW somewhere and generate a cost.

Is this possible??

Thanks for your time and help!

Regards,

S.A.

Answer 1

S.A.,

You asked if there is a better way of doing this. It seems the tasking a a little backwards. Perhaps a more logical sequence would be a milestone indicating when the panel order is placed (e.g. "place order for Solar Tech panels"), followed by a "x" day lead time for the panel manufacturer to do his thing (this could also be simply shown as a lag following placement of the order since the "task" of manufacturing the panels is at the panel supplier). This then feeds a milestone called "panel delivery". If you normally have 30 days to pay the invoice I suppose you could put another lag into the sequence for a "payment due" milestone but that's more of an accounting item, not a scheduling item. Remember Project is not designed to be accounting software, its planning and scheduling software.

As far as the material rate goes, when you identify a resource as a material resource, the Standard Rate field becomes the cost per unit, where the type of unit is identified in the Material Label field on the Resource Sheet. For example, let's say that each panel costs $100. That is entered into the Std. Rate field and "panels" would be entered into the Material Label field. Then when you assign the material resource to the "place order for Solar Tech panels" milestone you indicate how many panels are in the order, let's say 5. The Cost field will then show a total cost for 5 panels of $500. Or if the cost is by KW, then that is what you use for the material label.

Hope this helps.

John