Multiple Uses Fail To Calculate. Bug Or User Error?
 

Hello

I'm exploring the OmniPlan demo prior to a possible purchase and I appear to have run into something that makes it difficult to use.

I am scheduling a demo video production. Doing this, I would for example have a cameraman assigned to one task over three days 'Shoot'.

To that task, I would assign a meal allocation, say fifty dollars a day.

The way I am doing this is to create a Material Resource 'Meal', with a cost of 50 dollars cost/use, and assign it to the three days 'Shoot' task. I set the Assigned Amount to 3.

Which I would expect to happen in the Resource Inspector is that the total uses (3) is multiplied by the cost/use (50) and a total cost of 150 dollars is reflected.

What I see, however, is a total cost of 50 dollars.

Is this broken, or am I doing something silly?

Many thanks.

You assigned the meal to one task. Therefore, that is one use of the meal. OmniPlan really doesn't have a clean way to handle this. You could make "Meal" into an equipment resource with a cost of $6.25/hour (or whatever, to work out to $50/day). However, that would mean that if the guy works 3 days + 1 hour on the 4th day, the cost would be $156.25, which may or may not be how your compensation calculations work.

Aha.

Thank you for the reply but I'm still not entirely clear.

If I assign a Resource to a Task, and it counts that as one Use, what then does the Assigned Amount field in the Inspector actually do?

Say I assign 1 'Meal' Resource to one 'Film Day' Task and in the Task's Resources Inspector I enter 3 in the Assigned Amount.

Going back to the 'Meal' Resource Inspector I see 'Total Uses' as 3. Why should this not correctly multiply with cost of 50 dollars to come to 150 dollars?

Am I perhaps misunderstanding the paradigm of the application?

OK, sorry for confusion. That part is a bug. Total Uses x Cost/Use = Total Cost. At least, that's what it should be, but somehow we skip the multiplying step.

Ok! I thought I was going crazy!

I assume that will be part of any updates you make to the software.

Many thanks.