Allocating hours, how to do this?

[Matt5]

I’m not sure if Asana has this capability or not. I manage production of a very busy manufacturing plant, and we’ve been using Asana for about 4 years now and about to start using even more of it’s features.

One feature I’m hoping it has is some way of giving me a warning when I start moving task due-dates around and overcommit a certain department (and I know Asana doesn’t have a “department” feature so that’s part of my question on how to do this).

Here’s the background for how we have Asana set up. I CANNNOT change these, I have to be able to work within this system.

Every Job we do (every order) = 1 Asana task. Everything that must happen to fulfill that 1 Job is a subtask of that job. A simple but accurate way to show it would be:

• Main Task= “Smith Job”
  • Subtask, “Cut Materials”, 8 labor hours, due July 5.
  • Subtask, “Paint Materials,”, 25 labor hours, Due July 9.
  • Subtask, “Assemble Product”, 10 labor hours, due July 12
  • Subtask, “Install Product”, 20 labor hours, due August 1

Those 4 subtasks “cut, paint, assemble, install” all basically are their own department here in the shop, and each on of them has it’s own limit on how many labor hours I can schedule on any given day.

So how can I use Asana to give me a warning to indicate that I’ve overcommitted “Assembly” when I start assigning due dates?

Currently I not have any function of Asana set up for these. I COULD set up Assembly as a Team. Or a custom field. Or a Tag.

I also don’t have any function in Asana for labor hours. I have software that calculates labor hours for any given job, so I know that information WEEKS before the job is produced, and I can schedule it. But I need some way of having each of those subtasks (departments) to have a place for Labor Hours to live, and a way of getting a warning when I overcommit a department (or even better, have a ticker showing me “Labor hours remaining unallocatted”.

Any suggestions?

[Andrea_Mayer]

Hello @Matt5,

here is one scenario I can think of:

Create one project where you list all your client jobs. You can have one section where you list the main tasks of all clients (the main tasks with the subtasks that you need)
Definitely create a template task as well in case you don’t have it already (In my screenshot it shows as task in the board but to make it as template follow these steps: How to use task templates in Asana. • Asana Product Guide

Now every subtask is multi-homed in this project and a project used for hour allocation and overview.
Now in this project (as per the screenshot) I added sections per client and I added custom fields for hours allocated and hours consumed.

In list view it looks like this:

So you can see the total hrs allocated and used per client

Now as mentioned I multi-homed the tasks in another project:

This project has sections per job type so you have an overview on total hours allocated and used up already.

Then you could use Asana reporting to create graphs giving you a visual overview if needed

And you can use Asana Workload as well: Asana Workload - Manage Team Capacity and Rebalance Work • Asana

You can then set up rules and task dependencies as well. So for example the paint materials task is triggered once the cut materials task is done.

Hope that helps