Problem:
It is common practice to input the delivery dates of resources (typically material and equipment) in the schedule purely based on information that you receive from suppliers or manufacturers. This can create a number of problems:
- Delivery dates are manually controlled and adjusted
- The dates may not be a direct result of the plan and thus are nonoptimal
- Resulting schedules may report that equipment and material arrive too early or late
Solution:
In this article, you will learn how to optimize the delivery date of critical resources (aka just-in-time delivery) in ALICE. This will be achieved by applying the ALAP (as late as possible) constraint to get a “need-by date”, so that you can:
- Reduce storage cost
- Understand the true duration variance to the supplier/manufacturer’s committed delivery date (too early or too late)
- Provide “need-by dates” to stakeholders instead of manually iterating different delivery dates to see their impacts
How to Impact the Bottom Line:
- Make a data-driven decision about whether to accelerate a procurement package based on the calculated cost and benefit
- Make a data-driven decision about the costs and benefits of having critical resources onsite as committed by the supplier/manufacturer vs. when they are actually needed
How ALICE is Different from Other Tools:
When applying ALAP in other tools, no sequence adjustments (or activity reshuffling) occurs. Activities or milestones are simply pushed to the “as late as possible” date that is assigned without looking for ways to optimize at a holistic level.
In ALICE, new optimal schedule options are provided based on possible resequencing and reshuffling of activities to meet the new ALAP constraints added.
If changes are applied to the project (not necessarily directly related to the critical resource delivery dates), ALICE will continue to optimize and provide updated “need-by dates” for the critical resources. For example, if resource availability for other portions of the project are adjusted, ALICE will provide updated “need-by dates” based on these changing conditions.
Example Use Cases:
- As a Power Plant Operator/Owner, I need to manage a lot of OFCI (owner furnished contractor installed) equipment. I need to know the “need-by date” of all critical equipment so that I do not delay the contractor’s installation activities. I need to compare the “need-by date” to the date that the supplier is telling me to ensure the equipment will be delivered without impacting the overall schedule.
- As a Commercial Contractor, I have a special Italian stone that is custom made for my high-end casino project. I have input the delivery date that the manufacturer is telling me, but I am not sure how that impacts me. Do I need to have this put in storage if it is coming earlier than needed? If it comes later than projected, is it going to impact the overall schedule? I need to understand the “need-by date” to answer these questions.
How to find the “need-by date” in ALICE:
There are many different ways to find the “need-by date” in ALICE, depending on the way the schedule activities and milestones are set up. The following steps showcase one way of achieving the results. This same general workflow can be used in a similar way, such as if a…
- task is represented by an activity and a start milestone tied together
- task is represented only by an activity
- task is represented only by a milestone
- task is represented by an activity and a finish milestone tied together (example below)
Step 0: Existing schedule:
Often, the activities/milestones to track critical resource delivery look like one of the below:
- Activities that have a manually set duration: “1st Delivery of Modular Units on Site” = 120 days, or
- Milestones that are manually constrained to a specific date: “Milestone: 1st Delivery of Modular Units” = Finish on or before February 5, 2027, or
- Milestone that is tied to an activity based on a manually set duration
Note that in the example here, the milestone and activity have a FF relationship:
Step 1:
Remove any existing primary constraint type and constraint date for milestones or activities that track the critical resource delivery. Example: Remove constraint type and constraint date for activity called “1st Delivery of Modular Units on Site”. Remove constraint type and constraint date for milestone called “1st Delivery of Modular Units”.
Step 2:
Add and apply ALAP constraints to both activities and milestones that track the critical resource delivery. Example: add “as late as possible” constraint to both the activity called “1st Delivery of Modular Units on Site” and to the milestone called “1st Delivery of Modular Units”.
Step 3:
Change the relationship between the activity and the milestone to type FaF (finish-at-finish).
By applying ALAP to the milestone and task AND removing the constraining logic or irrelevant logic ties, ALICE can look for solutions that automatically schedule each delivery date as a “need-by date.”
Step 4: Run a new scenario.
Step 5: Bonus!
Export information into .csv to generate a procurement log based on your project setup. If you have specific naming conventions, task IDs, and/or customer UDFs, you can filter by specific criteria to look for all activities/milestones of critical resource delivery.