Hello AACE community

I'm currently working with a trade contractor operating under a unit rate contract. Their progress tracking is based on actual units placed, using "% complete by units" as the basis for earnings. The schedule type is set to Fixed Duration and Units, and while this setup provides a measure of schedule adherence (SPI), it does not link physical progress to earned value. Consequently, actual hours or costs cannot be used for performance analysis.

I'm seeking advice on two fronts:

1. How can we improve measurement tracking in scheduling software under this unit-based progress model?
2. What strategies or arguments can be used to encourage the contractor to link physical progress units to earned value calculations for more meaningful performance metrics?

Any suggestions, experiences, or tools that have worked well for you would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

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Mohammed Kabir
Planner/Scheduler
VALE SA
Sudbury ON
ekabir@shaw.ca
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Hello Mohammed,

We use Spider Project and enter not mythical percent complete but actual physical volumes that were done, duration spent, materials consumed, etc. that are not always proportional. No problems with Earned Value or any other performance analysis methods.

There are several issues when trying to use P6 for EV calculations, some of which are outlined in my paper in the link below that compares P6, MSP and Asta Powerproject:

https://eastwoodharris.com/comparison-of-microsoft-project-oracle-primavera-p6-and-elecosoft-asta-powerproject/ 

Unfortunately, although P6 called construction scheduling software it lacks a large amount of functionality I expect to see in such an expensive piece of software that are found in other software packages like Powerproject.

The P6 EV functions in my opinion are very weak and before I retired last year all my construction industry customers who conducted EV exported the raw data from P6 to other software packages to perform their EV calculations due to the lack of EV reporting functionality in P6. 

Thank you for your valuable feedback. I can't disagree with you.

Thank you for your comment/