Construction procurement

Terry

What is the best way to track material procurement with lead times, ideally highlighting critical/order deadline dates? Is it another task, the duration of the lead time and linked to the work task, or can there be two bars (or milestone) of time per task spaced out to allow the lead time?

vicky

I can think of following configurations:

two rows
activity (or milestone) one… material procurement
activity two… task needing the material
activity (or milestone) one and two are connected by a dependency and a buffer for the delivery time
activity two has a start constrain to not start after a specific date
=> this will show a conflict if activity (or milestone) one gets pushed to a later date (because it actually started or ended later)

If you need conflicts for all delays (on order and delivery), you could do:

activity one with the overall duration for delivery and work the effort you need for the order.
activity two, having a date constrain not to start later than a date.
activity one and two are linked without any buffer
=> this will show conflict on activity two if activity one gets pushed to a later date
Or… if the actual values of activity one show that it needs more time which pushes its expected end to a later time point with consequences on activity two.

I'm sure there are other ways to model this too…