Early Access feature: Labor Activity Planning

Edit online

The Apptio planning applications 2.45 release of March 20, 2019 introduced an alternative mode for project labor planning called Labor Activity Planning. The Admin or Budget Process Owner can make Labor Activity Planning features visible in the interface.

See Edit the Company Profile. Apptio expects Labor Activity Planning to become the default labor planning feature set sometime in the future, and we’re giving customers access to it now for familiarization. The key new feature introduced by Labor Activity Planning is the activity. Current Labor Planning does not support very detailed analysis of resource charges to projects. With the introduction of the activity in Labor Activity Planning, however, you gain more insight into resources’ work on projects, and can distinguish capitalizable from noncapitalizable labor costs.

With Labor Activity Planning enabled, you report a resource’s time per project, as well as the activities they performed. Each activity supports unique general ledger transfer accounts, as well as activity rates that may differ from the specific resource’s pay rate.

The following table compares the two labor features:

Issue How Labor Planning works How Labor Activity Planning works
Labor allocations Resources are allocated to labor pools via the Allocation cell; allocations expressed as percentage of time. Labor activities record resource time against a Project, Resource, and Activity (type of work).
Labor pools Define available capacity for project work at an aggregated resources level. Still supported but you can now assign activities to individual resources. NOTE: When Labor Activity Planning is enabled, labor pools are no longer a reference data set, and are replaced by the Activity Types, Project Labor Activity Rates, and Department Labor Activity Rates data sets.
Labor rates Defined per resource and applied for all work. Defined per activity and associated with specific resources assigned to the activity, per project.
Cross-charging Limited: single general ledger account pair for all project-to-department cross-charges. Flexible: Activity type defines general ledger accounts for cross-charging.

Changes in views include the following:

  • The Ledger page for projects has been removed, since you can see all indirect and direct labor costs in the Summary tab, and enter labor allocations in the Allocations tab.
  • The Existing and Planned tabs for Labor are combined into one Resources tab, for a simpler single view of resources. You can now tell if a resource is existing or not by the checkbox in the Existing column. You can filter the Existing column to analyze resources in more detail.

Admin or Budget Process Owner tasks