Question

Resource Forecast: Snapshots - ETC / EAC Recalculated Pros / Cons

  • 7 December 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 171 views
I
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  • ImR
  • Do Gooder (Customer)
  • 1 reply

Hello,

We are project-based organisation with many projects running concurrently and with a strict monthly reporting cycle. Each project is enforced to create monthly resource and financial forecasts.

We’ve been having some issues recently with resource forecasts generating negative ETC costs which then disrupt financial forecasts, see this thread. 

We have been investigating further in test environments and noticed that our issues disappear when we use “EAC Recalculated” in the snapshot matching field when generating a resource forecast, rather than using “ETC recalculated”. When we went live, we were instructed to use “ETC recalculated”.

Unfortunately, the help panel in IFS doesn’t include any information on the difference between these two calculation methods when selecting this field. With a PM hat on, EAC recalculated makes the most logical sense as we want Committed and Used hours to be driven by timesheet & shop order data, and ETC hours be driven my monthly manual intervention by the PM and work package managers. Thus making EAC automatically calculated (Committed + Used + ETC). Planned hours should be independent and a financial baseline to measure EAC against.

We are nervous to change as we don’t fully understand what these calculation methods mean. Can anyone please shed light, pros / cons of each and typically scenarios where they would be used.

We operate fixed price contracts, using waterfall lifecycles with strict scope, financial, schedule baselines. Design, prototype, serial manufacture products.

Thanks,

Ian

1 reply

J
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Badge +7

Hi Ian,

I cannot really advise on which setting would work best for you, but here is some background info that might be useful.

The Snapshot Matching parameter impacts whether the ETC or the EAC will be recalculated when linking a snapshot.

As a simple example, let's say you have a Forecast with an ETC of 100 hours and EAC of 100 hours.

There are 40 actual hours reported, included in the snapshot. When linking this snapshot:

* With Snapshot matching set to ETC Recalculated, you would end up with Committed/Used Hours of 40 (the reported value), which would give a recalculated ETC of 60 hours (EAC of 100 - the actual hours of 40) and EAC remaining at 100.

* With Snapshot matching set to EAC Recalculated, you would end up with Committed/Used Hours of 40 (the reported value), which would keep the ETC of 100 hours and the EAC to be recalculated to 140 (actual hours of 40 + ETC of 100).

A reason you might end up with a negative ETC value is if you have more actual reported hours than the EAC on the forecast and use ETC Recalculated. This sort of means that you would need to report negative hours to reach the EAC, but in reality it probably means that you have more reported hours than originally planned for, and that you would have to adjust the forecast accordingly.

It could also be useful to run some tests in a test environment to get a feel for how these options work (note that you can disconnect the snapshot, then reconnect it using the 'other' method to see the impact).

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Johan

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