Hi,

as usual, I have a question from one of my Blog Readers:

“Hi Nenad. i follow your blog step but i added resource as material not as work, but it doesn’t come up to me in the calendars list to adjust its working/non working time. is there a reason for that or is it just a bug?
thanks”

I’ll show you that in MS PROJECT 2013.

Suppose that you want to build a wall:

You need two type of Resources: John as Work Resource (he will build the wall), and Bricks as Material Resource (you need Bricks for the wall, don’t you?)

As you can see, I can not assign any Calendar to the Material Resource

I will now assign John to the Task, and 100 Bricks for the same Task:

and I’ll get:

Let’s say that there is a Holliday at Tuesday 11.3.2014:

I’ll get:

As you can see, the Task will be finished at Monday, 10.03.2014, nota at Friday 14.3.2014, because it needs 5 working days.

And only John is affected (e.g. Working Resources) with Calendars. But why not Material Resources as well?

Because, for example Bricks, are not available at certain period. You have them or not. It is logical. On the other hand, let suppose that you have a machine need for building a wall, and you do not have them available all the time. In that Case, you should create, for example, Machine as work Resource, make a Calendar for it’s availability and then assign them to the Task.

Now I will tell to MS PROJECT when the Machine is available for my Project:

and I will get:

Now let’s look at Resource Usage View:

As you can see, the Machine is over allocated at Monday, and Tuesday. If I do not use this method, but if I change Calendar for Machine like this:

I will get:

So the Task will be finished two day latter. let’s see Task Usage View:

No the Machine is not Over allocated, but there is something wrong with this scenario. I John need the Machine for the work he couldn’t work without it at Monday, and Tuesday .

So you have to be extremely careful when you are using exceptions, and calendars for Resources.

Regards