General Area: Planning Tab

Use the Planning tab in the General area of the Configuration workspace to specify utilization and schedule thresholds and other planning configuration options.

The Planning tab is only available if you activated the Resource Planning module.

Contents

Field Description
Utilization Thresholds

In the first field, enter the lowest percentage of an employee's utilization target that is considered properly utilized.

In the second field, enter the highest percentage of an employee's utilization target that is considered properly utilized.

Example: You set the lowest percentage to 95 and the highest percentage to 105. If an employee's target utilization is 80 percent, that employee is considered properly utilized for a given period if their utilization is between 76 percent (.95 x 80) and 84 percent (1.05 x 80). She is underutilized if her utilization is below 76 percent and overutilized if it is above 84 percent.

Scheduled Thresholds

In the first field, enter the lowest scheduled percentage of available hours that is considered properly scheduled.

In the second field, enter the highest scheduled percentage of available hours that is considered properly scheduled.

Example: You set the lowest percentage to 95 and the highest percentage to 105. If an employee's available hours for a week is 40, that employee is considered properly scheduled if they are scheduled for between 38 hours (.95 x 40) and 42 hours (1.05 x 40). He is underscheduled if his scheduled hours are less than 38 and overscheduled if they are more than 42.

Hours Decimal Places

Click to select the number of decimal places you want to display in hours values: none, one or two.

This setting only applies to the Resource Management workspace.

Job-to-Date (JTD) Through

To set the cutoff date for calculating job-to-date (JTD) hours and amounts, which in turn are used to calculate estimate-to complete (ETC) and estimate-at-completion (EAC) hours and amounts, click in this field and select the date.

Under normal circumstances, you do not need to set this date. Initially, it defaults to the current date. From that point on, when you use the API or the Historical Hours import process to load actual hours that employees have charged to projects, Deltek CRM automatically sets the JTD date to the date of the latest historical labor record in the database. If you need to set the date yourself temporarily, you can do that, but the next time that you load historical hours, your entry will be replaced with the latest labor record date.

Soft and Hard Book Assignments

To turn on the option to designate resource assignments as "soft" (tentative) or "hard" (confirmed or approved), select this check box.

The soft and hard book feature enables you to distinguish between tentative or placeholder resource assignments and those confirmed or approved assignments that you consider a permanent part of the plan. When you generate planning reports, you can filter those reports to include or exclude assignments based on booking status if you include the BOOKING column on the report.

When you turn on this option, no security roles have the access rights to hard book assignments. Before users can hard book assignments, you must also click to go to the Security area of the Configuration workspace and select Can Hard Book for those roles that are authorized to hard book assignments.

If you turn on soft and hard booking and later decide to clear this check box to turn off the feature, all existing assignments are automatically set to soft booked. If you then reactivate booking, they remain soft booked. The hard booked status is not restored to those assignments that had it before.