Creating and Maintaining Detailed Plans

As mentioned in the Detailed Planning section, a detailed plan can be created as an independent plan or as a refinement of existing job budgets created in the window Job Budgets.

The planning lines are created and maintained on the basis of the information entered in the table part in a grid structure with slots. Each planning slot specifies a period of either a week or a day, depending on whether you have specified planning to be carried out on weekly or daily basis in the card part of the window. The time horizon is also specified in the card part of the window.

If the planner chooses to create planning lines on the basis of existing job budget lines, the window Detailed Planning contains an action which shows proposals to the tasks on which work should be done in the period represented by the window. This “proposal” will be based on the latest revision of the jobs’ planning budgets describing the tasks to be carried out within a range of dates which overlap the time frame displayed in the window.

In a job budget, you might, for example, have created a job budget line which specifies that 20 hours should be used on task T by an employee who belongs to the employee category EC. When a proposal is created, Maconomy will display that a proposal for 20 hours to be carried out by an employee assigned to the category EC has been created for task T (without any specification of a specific employee). If you decide that employee E (belonging to employee category EC) should carry out all 20 hours of work, and if the number of hours on the job budget line is then changed to 25 hours, Maconomy will automatically display that another 5 hours should be allocated on task T by a member of category EC in the field “Quantity, Remaining” on those planning lines for which the job budget line in question forms the basis. Maconomy makes a corresponding calculation if the number of hours on the job budget line is reduced. If the number of hours is reduced by, for example, 5 hours for an employee, Maconomy automatically suggests that these 5 hours are deducted from the employee’s number of allocated hours by showing a negative number of hours on the planning line in question.

In the above example, it was decided that all hours should be assigned to only one employee. However, the number of hours proposed by Maconomy at the creation of planning lines on the basis of a job budget can also be allocated to several employees, but only if an employee category has been specified on the job budget line instead of a specific employee, or if you have specified neither an employee category nor an employee.

You can thus make plans for several employees on the same task created on the basis of a job budget line. The planner can select to create a long-term plan by means of a job budget, which can then later be refined by allocating the planned number of hours to the employees in question. This can be done when it has been decided exactly when which employees are at disposal, or which employees might be best suited to carry out the tasks in question.

If planning lines have been created on the basis of a job budget, and this job budget is revised, Maconomy will bring the planning lines in question up to date. Planning lines that might now be assigned to a deleted job budget line will also be deleted. If a detailed plan is assigned to a job budget, it is also possible to select an action that deletes all planning lines assigned to job budget lines that have been marked as completed in the window Job Planning. In this way, the resource planning will always be updated.

When information for a detailed plan is maintained, Maconomy can allocate hours automatically by using a number of tools when hours are entered for an employee on a planning line.

When detailed plans are maintained, Maconomy also checks whether the planner exceeds the number of hours specified in the job budget that forms the basis of the detailed plan. This might be the case if planning lines have been created for more hours on a task than originally specified on the job budget line used as a basis for the planning. If this happens, Maconomy can be set up to solve the problem by means of a selected method.

If an estimated time-to-completion has been specified for the job budget by time sheet users or by the project manager in the Job Cost module, the estimate will be shown in the detailed planning. The planner will then know whether any resources should be added or removed from each task in the detailed planning. For each estimate specified for a task, a date must also be entered. This date stamping is used in the detailed planning to inform Maconomy as of which date the estimate should be implemented in the detailed plan.

For example, assume that in a planning budget 100 hours has been budgeted for a task. It is then planned in the detailed planning that 40 hours should be completed by the end of a given week, and the remaining 60 hours are planned after this week. Then assume that only 35 hours were spent in the week in question, and in addition it is estimated that, by the end of the week, 50 hours remain to be completed of this task. Then this estimated time-to-completion and an estimate date will be shown in the detailed planning to tell the planner that as of the week in question only 50 hours need to be planned—not 60 and not 65 (60 + (40: 35) = 65).

If an employee is allocated too many hours compared to his planning time, you can define how Maconomy should react to such a situation in the window System Information in the Set-Up module. In that window, you can define whether Maconomy should ignore the situation, give a warning, or avoid the situation by issuing an error message.