Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Assigning Material Resources to Tasks

Assigning material resources is similar to assigning work resources—with one exception: When you assign material resources, you fill in the quantity of material the task will consume instead of the time a work resource spends.

Work resources are always allocated by some unit of time, but you can dole out material resources by whatever unit of measurement makes sense: milligrams of medication, reams of paper, or gallons of water. Truth be told, Project couldn’t care less about a material resource’s unit of measurement. It calculates cost by multiplying the material resource’s Standard Rate (Setting Up Work and Material Costs) by the quantity you enter in the assignment. It’s your responsibility to define the unit of measurement in the resource’s Material Label cell and the Standard Rate as the cost of one unit of the material. Figure 9-11 shows how the material resource fields produce cost in an assignment. (The box on When Material Quantity Depends on Time explains what to do when the amount of material consumed varies with time.)

Figure 9-11. In Task Form view, 10 cartons of paper are assigned to the task. The Material Label for the Paper resource is “Carton” and the Std. Rate for Paper is $25 (these fields aren’t shown here). To assign 10 cartons of paper to the task, you enter the quantity “10” in the Units cell. Project then multiplies the Std. ...