Managing Multiple Calendars in Construction Industry

Managing multiple calendars in the construction industry is essential to ensure that the project timeline is accurate and that all stakeholders are aware of the project schedule. However, it is important to use multiple calendars carefully and ensure that they are compatible with each other to avoid any conflicts in the project schedule. Using construction management software with calendar management can help manage multiple calendars effectively. Critical Path Method (CPM) is a scheduling technique that can be used to handle multiple calendars in scheduling.

When managing construction activities, it is important to note that they are managed and reported in daytime units, not hour-time units. Therefore, using multiple calendars need to be carefully used, as different hours may cause breaks in the schedule and the total floats have friction numbers. Using more than one calendar on a project is liable to create issues in Primavera P6. Here are some key points to consider when managing multiple calendars in the construction industry:

·??????Multiple calendars are required in many construction projects to effectively represent various project conditions such as work properties.

·??????Although schedules using multiple calendars is a generally accepted practice (even required in some cases), different calendars do not always work well together.

·??????Construction management software with calendar management can help manage multiple calendars effectively.

·??????When using multiple calendars, it is important to ensure that they are compatible with each other and that they do not cause any conflicts in the project schedule

·??????Critical Path Method (CPM) is a scheduling technique that can be used to handle multiple calendars in scheduling.

The Below Simple example shows that the Procurement Team is working 8 hours per day while the construction People are working 12 hours per day, the use of two calendars on the project creates issues in Primavera P6, Activities will seemingly start or finish on the wrong day. In most situations, we would expect that with a Finish to Start relationship the predecessor finishes the day before the successor starts. This is unlikely, however, if the number of hours being worked each day does not match for the predecessor and successor.

In that example, wrong dates and wrong Total float will be reported due to the Procurement task being completed at 5:00 Pm while the construction activity starts at the same day at 5:00 PM, the successor can work for 4 hours on the same day that the predecessor finishes. Since most users do not show the time of day in the date columns it will appear that the relationship between these two activities is something other than Finish to Start.

The solution is quite simple.

Make all the calendars have the same working hours per day in different working hours per week, that would not have a big impact on the construction industry schedules as the lowest level of monitoring time is the day.

The reality is that most users do not want to see the time of day.

the above solution is required to set up the duration type to be fixed duration & units

For clients who schedule by the hour the above solution will not be suitable because the time of day will of course be displayed. The main reason is for resource-loaded schedules it is important to have the hours per day match expectations.

the solution is by manipulating the calendars be added more lunch break time on those calendars with long hours per day to make the start and finish time the same on all used calendars.