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Interrupting Activity Progress

At some point in the project, you may need to stop work on an activity for a period of time. Indicate this interruption by specifying suspend and resume dates in the Status tab of Activity Details.

Suspend an activity’s progress Display the Activity Details, Status tab. In the Activity Table, select the activity you want to suspend, then enter a Suspend date. When the activity resumes, enter a Resume date. The activity must have an actual start date before you can enter a suspend date.

Record the Suspend date as the end of the last day on which work occurred for the activity. When work begins again, record the Resume date.

The module calculates an actual duration for all activities based on the amount of time actually worked. The amount of time an activity’s progress is suspended is considered nonworktime based on activity and resource calendar definitions. You can use bar necking to graphically display the suspended activity’s nonworktime. In the Bars dialog, Bar Settings tab, select the Calendar nonwork time option under Bar Necking Settings. You can also show suspend and resume dates as columns.

You can only enter suspend and resume dates on Task Dependent and Resource Dependent activities. When you enter a suspend or resume date, the activity is suspended or resumed at the beginning of the specified day.

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304 Part 4: Updating and Managing the Schedule

If you manually plan future period allocation for assignments to activities, the Budgeted Units values you enter for an assignment are not affected when you enter a suspend and resume date for an activity; the values remain in the same future period buckets in which you originally entered them. However, an assignment’s manually-planned future period Remaining (Early) Units are pushed out to the resume date once you schedule the project.

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Updating, Scheduling, and Leveling 305

Applying Actuals

Once progress is recorded by approving timesheets, entering actual data, and/or setting Auto Compute Actuals options, you must apply actuals. Applying actuals schedules activities with progress and/or that have the Auto Compute Actuals option set. When you apply actuals, you move the data date or “time now.” The module schedules activities only within the specified timescale (between the current data date and new data date) and calculates progress for those activities that are set to automatically calculate actuals.

Apply actuals Open the project or EPS node that contains the projects to schedule. Choose Tools, Apply Actuals. If you opened an EPS node that contains multiple projects, you can choose to use the same data date for all projects and then specify the date, or you can choose to use a different data date for each project and then select the dates.

Choose to use a different data date

for each project.

If you choose to always recalculate, all activities

are treated as Fixed Units and Fixed Units/Time.

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306 Part 4: Updating and Managing the Schedule

Apply actuals as a service You can use Job Services to automatically apply actuals to selected projects/EPS nodes at regularly scheduled intervals. Choose Tools, Job Services, then click Add. Select Apply Actuals in the Service Type field. Specify a number in the Job # field to indicate the sequence in which the service should be performed, if more than one service is listed. Type a brief description of the service in the Job Name field. In the Status field, select Enabled to activate the apply actuals service. You can suspend a service at any time by selecting Disabled in the Status field. In the Run Job area on the Job Details tab, schedule when the service should be run: every day at a specific time, or weekly, every two weeks, or monthly on a day and time you specify.

Click the Job Options tab to select the projects/EPS nodes to which the job service will apply actuals.

Mark the checkbox for the project you want to use as the Default Project. The value of the activity remaining duration setting for each project is taken from that of the Default Project.

Select the date up to which you want to apply the open project's/EPS node’s actuals.

You must have the appropriate access rights to set up job services. The Job Service does not interact with the module client when running jobs. All jobs are run on the server(s) on which the Job Service is installed.

Primavera - Project Management