This article outlines everything you need to know about equipment resources in ALICE:

• Why Assign Equipment Resources?
• How To Create Equipment Resources
• How to Bulk Assign Equipment Resources 
• Equipment Utilization Graph
• Using Excel Export/Import to Mass Edit Equipment Resources

Why Assign Equipment Resources?

Assigning resources to your schedule in ALICE enables a powerful set of optimization benefits. ALICE will dynamically shuffle resources to help you find the fastest feasible schedule duration while abiding by your scheduling, logic, and resource constraints. 

Most teams need to fully resource load their schedules today because it's a time-intensive process in legacy tools. However, we know that some consideration of resources is necessary to realistically assess the feasibility of your schedule based on the required resources in the schedule and your estimation of available resources.

With ALICE, users can assign resources and resource logic once and create unlimited resource-loaded schedules. The process is not all-or-nothing—users can add details where they are strategically beneficial and keep a coarse level of detail in less critical areas of the schedule.

Read on to learn how to create and assign resources to tasks in ALICE Core, how traditional resource loading is applied in Core, and some of the unique benefits of using ALICE to explore scheduled resources.

How To Create Equipment Resources

In order to assign an equipment resource to a task, it must first exist in the Resources tab. If your ALICE project was created by importing an existing schedule, the resources from the native schedule will be imported. Resources can also be created and assigned within ALICE.

For a more hands-on experience, navigate through the player for an interactive walk-through, or if you prefer a more detailed approach, scroll down for a step-by-step guide:

Create Equipment:

1. In the Resources tab located in the upper right, go to the Equipment tab
2. Enter required crew data:
   • Equipment Name
   • Qty - number of available equipment
   • $/Hr - equipment cost per hour
   • Idle Cost - choose if you would like ALICE to calculate equipment idle cost
3. Click CreateEquipmentt to complete the process

Notes: 

• Tip: You can also import resource metadata from a historical project and easily assign the resources to your new schedule.

How To Bulk Assign Equipment Resources

After resources are created in the resources tab, they can be assigned to specific tasks in ALICE. They can be assigned one at a time or in bulk.

We recommend you start by resource-loading critical path activities to quickly identify risks and opportunities on the critical path that can make the biggest impact on project duration.  

For a more hands-on experience, navigate through the player for an interactive walk-through, or if you prefer a more detailed approach, scroll down for a step-by-step guide:

Crew, Equipment, and Material Assignment (One at a Time):

1. In the Gantt chart, "right-click" and select "Edit Columns."
2. Select "Crews", "Equipment" or "Materials" and click "Done" to add the columns to the Gantt chart.
3. Double-click on the cell of the respected resource column to open the assignment window.
4. Define the type and number of resources, and click Save to complete the process.

Bulk Assignment:

1. To ease the bulk assignment, use the Filter tool.
2. Go to "Task/Names" and filter for operations that share the same resources.
3. Select All and click Done to apply the filter.
4. Select all activities by clicking on the WBS summary
5. On the upper-left corner, click on "Resource Assignment" functionality
6. Select Crew, Equipment, or Material assignment
7. Define the type and number of resources, and click Save to complete the process.

Equipment Utilization Graph

Equipment utilization graphs and downloadable .csv data are available for each schedule on the Analyze page.

The table below provides a general overview of the available analytics graphs in ALICE as well as their basic properties.

Equipment Utilization Graph Example

The Equipment Utilization graph provides a histogram of daily equipment usage.

Equipment that is on-site but idle needs to be shown in the histogram.

The utilization is color-coded per crew so you can intuitively see what equipment is on-site each day.

Using Filters

Filters can be used to visualize the usage of one or multiple pieces of equipment at a time.

Export Equipment Utilization Data

The CSV export will show a breakdown of day-by-day usage for every piece of equipment.

Note: A color scale was added in Excel to the CSV export shown above to make the data more digestible.

Using Excel Export/Import to Mass Edit Equipment Resources

See this article on how to use the .csv (Excel) export to mass edit equipment resources information, and then mass import back into the ALICE platform.