Primavera P6 Professional supports assigning fixed price costs to activities; which, for example, is handy if you have a fixed price contract. A fixed-price contract would be negotiated by the procurement department who would agree on a fixed price with a contractor or subcontractor to provide labor, materials and/or equipment costs to complete a project /or project activity.
So how do you assign fixed price costs to an activity? Let’s take a closer look.
Below in Figure 1, we have our pipe repair and improvement project where we have assigned the activity labor and material costs for all resource activities except ‘Insulate Pipe’. We have been waiting for our procurement department to negotiate a fixed price cost with a pipe insulation subcontractor, to install insulation.
Figure 1
We receive notification from the procurement department that the fixed price cost for the ‘Insulate Pipe’ activity will be $4,000. We are now tasked with entering this fixed price cost against the ‘Insulate Pipe’ activity and providing a clear schedule for our stakeholders.
First, we enter the Projects tab and then in the bottom details the Calculations tab. Under ‘Activities’ and ‘Default Price / Unit for activities without resource or role Price/Units’ we enter $1.00/h, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
We proceed to our ‘Insulate Pipe’ activity and enter the $4,000 fixed price cost in ‘Budgeted Labor Cost’ column, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
We want our stakeholders to know that the ‘Budgeted Labor Cost’ column also includes fixed price costs, so we need to edit our column to ensure it is more descriptive.
By selecting ‘View’ and ‘Columns’ from the top drop-down menu we bring up the columns dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
We click on the ‘Edit Column’ button on the right-hand side and the ‘Edit Column’ dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 5, where we enter “Budgeted Labor or Fixed Price Cost” in the ‘New Title’ field.
Figure 5
By selecting OK twice, the column heading “Budgeted Labor or Fixed Price Cost” is displayed, as in Figure 6.
Figure 6
Summary
You can assign in Primavera P6 fixed price costs to activities, but you must set the project’s calculations default price per unit for activities without resource assignments to $1.00/h first. Then you can simply enter the fixed price cost into the ‘Budgeted Labor Cost Column.’ Additionally, you can alter the column heading to reflect your fixed price cost.