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

• Why Assign Material Resources?
• How to Create Materials Resource
• How to Bulk Assign Material Resources 
• The Difference Between Consumable vs. Reusable Materials 
• Material Consumption Graph
• Using Excel Export/Import to Mass Edit Material Resources

 

Why Assign Material 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 do not 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 one time and create unlimited resource loaded schedules. The process is not all-or-nothing -- users can add detail where it is 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 to using ALICE to explore schedule resources.

 

How to Create Materials Resource

In order to assign a material resource to a task, the material resource 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 Materials:

1. In the Resources tab located in the upper right, go to the Material tab
2. Enter required material data:
   • Material Name
   • Type - Consumable or Reusable
   • Qty Avail. - number of available material
   • $/Unit - material cost per unit
3. Click Create Material to complete the process

 

How To Bulk Assign Material Resources

After the resources have been created in the resources tab, they can be assigned to specific tasks in ALICE. Resources 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 to 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 respected resource column to open the assignment window.
4. Define the type and number of resource, 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 resource, and click Save to complete the process.

 

The Difference Between Consumable vs. Reusable Materials

There are two types of materials that can be created in ALICE: consumable and reusable.

• Consumable resources are no longer available for the remainder of the project once they are consumed (e.g., concrete, single-use formwork, EPS structural foam, rebar)

• Reusable materials may be effectively reused multiple times over a project’s duration (e.g., reusable formwork sets, deck shoring)

Consumable Resource Behavior:

From Figure 1, we see that the project only has two (2) sets of column formwork available. Pretend for a moment that the column formwork has been classified as a consumable resource. Figure 3 shows a basic 3-task recipe where specific material actions have been assigned to each task using column formwork: requires for ‘form’ and supplies for ‘strip form.’ Actions define how the task treats the assigned material resource, as shown in Figure 4.

Observe how the red line behaves, representing how the material is tracked throughout the activity.

 

Figure 3 - Formwork material behavior as a consumable resource. Note the resource quantity on the y-axis refers to the available quantity defined in the resource pool.

 

Figure 4 - Define the material’s action.

 

Reusable Resource Behavior:

Figure 5 shows how the formwork material behaves when defined as reusable; all other material and task parameters remain unchanged. No matter the action, whether required or supplied, the reusable material is only in use for the duration of the task it is assigned to.

 

Figure 5 - Material behavior as a reusable resource. Note the resource quantity on the y-axis refers to the available quantity defined in the resource pool.

 

When To Use Consumable vs. Reusable?

It depends. What do you wish to accomplish with your materials?

Scenarios aligned with defining materials as consumable:

• Tracking cumulative material costs over the project’s duration
  • Every time a consumable material is used in ALICE, its cost is tallied
• Materials that are only used once

Defining materials as reusable is useful when:

• Constraining a quantity of a consumable material that can be placed over time (e.g., concrete)
• Tracking the usage frequency of material resources that are able to be reused multiple times on a project

 

Summary of Consumable vs. Reusable Behavior:

If we told ALICE we could only place a maximum of  two (2) cubic feet of concrete at any given time for whatever reason, and we modeled our resource constraints similar to Example Scenario 2 above, ALICE would sequence our project as shown in Figure 11:

 

 

Figure 11 - Comparison between consumable and reusable concrete material quantification through a series of recipe operations

 

Understanding the behavior of consumable versus reusable materials in ALICE can unlock a user’s creative potential for modeling unique project constraints. The principles outlined above can also be applied to constraining or tracking the application of labor and equipment resources. Don’t be afraid to test things out and push ALICE to the limit!

 

Material Consumption Graph

Material consumption 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.

Available Graph	Purpose	Affected By Filters
Daily Material Consumption	Reusable Materials	By Material Filters
Cumulative Material Consumption	Consumable Materials	By Material Filters

 

Daily Material Consumption Graph Example

The Daily Material Consumption graph provides a histogram of daily material consumption by each material type.

The consumption is color-coded per material type so you can intuitively see what the consumption is on site each day.

 

Cumulative Material Consumption Graph Example

The Cumulative Material Consumption graph provides a cumulative total of material consumption by each material type.

The consumption is color-coded per material type so you can intuitively see what the consumption is on site each day.

Using Filters

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

 

Export Material Consumption Data

The CSV export for the Material Consumption graph includes a day-by-day breakdown for the usage of every material. The breakdown is cumulative for consumable and shows daily usage for reusable.

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 Material Resources

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