Project Forecast Lines

This module allows to plan your resources using forecast lines.

For each employee of the company, the module will generate forecast line records with a positive capacity based on their working time schedules. Then, tasks assigned to employees will generate forecast lines with a negative capacity which will “consume” the work time capacity of the employees.

The idea is that you can then see the work capacity and scheduled work of people by summing the “forecasts” per time period. If you have more resources (positive forecast) than work (negative forecast) you will have a positive net sum. Otherwise you are in trouble and need to recruit or reschedule your work. Another way to use the report is checking when the work capacity of a department becomes positive (or high enough) in order to provide you potential customers with an estimate of when a project would be able to start.

Forecast lines also come in two states “forecast” or “confirmed”, depending on whether the consumption is confirmed or not. For instance, holidays requests and sales quotation lines create lines of type “forecast”, whereas tasks for project which are in a running state create lines with type “confirmed”.

To get the best experience using the Forecast application you may want to install:

project_forecast_line_holidays_public module which takes public holidays into account during forecast lines creation
project_forecast_line_bokeh_chart module which improves the reports of project_forecast_line module by using the bokeh widget available in OCA/web

Important

This is an alpha version, the data model and design can change at any time without warning. Only for development or testing purpose, do not use in production. More details on development status

Table of contents

Usage
Bug Tracker
Credits

Usage

Forecast lines have the following data:

Forecast hours: it is positive for resources (employees) and negative for things which consume time (project tasks, for instance)
From and To date which are the beginning and ending of the period of the capacity
Consolidated forecast: this is a computed field, which is computed as follows:
- for costs (project tasks for instance) we take the absolute value of the forecast hours (so it is a positive number)
- for resources (employee capacity for a period), we take the capacity and substract all the costs for that employee on the same period. So it will be positive if the employee still has some free time, and negative if he is overloaded with work.
- this consolidated forecast is currently converted to days to ease readability of the forecast report

Objects creating forecast lines:

employees with a forecast role will create forecast line with a positive capacity and type “confirmed” for each day on which they work. This information comes from their work calendar, and the different roles that are linked to the employee.
draft sale orders (if enabled in the settings) will create forecast lines of type “forecast” for each sale order line having a product with a forecast role and start and end dates. The forecast hours are negative
confirmed sale orders don’t create forecast lines. This is handled by the tasks created at the confirmation of the sale order
project tasks create forecast lines if they have a linked role and planned start/end dates. The type of the line will depend on the related project’s stage. The forecast_hours field is based on the remaining time of the task, which is spread on the work days of the planned start and end date of the task. If the current date is in the middle of the planned duration of the task, it is used as the start date. If the planned end date is in the past the task does not generate forecast lines (and you need to fix your planning). In case multiple employees are assigned to the task the forecast is split equally between them.
holiday requests create negative forecast lines with type “forecast” when they are pending manager validation.
Validated holiday requests do not generate forecast lines, as they alter the work calendar of the employee: the employee will not have a positive line associated to his leave days.

The creation of forecast lines is done either in real time when some actions are performed by the user (requesting leaves, updating the remaining time on a project task, timesheeting) and also via a cron that runs on a daily basis. The cron is required to cleanup lines related to dates in the past and to recompute the lines related to project tasks by computing the ratio of remaing time on the tasks on the remaining days, for tasks which are in progress. So, to start using consolidated forecast report you first need to set everything mentioned in Usage section. Then, probably run Forecast recomputation cron manually from Scheduled Actions or wait till cron creates records.

Bug Tracker

Bugs are tracked on GitHub Issues. In case of trouble, please check there if your issue has already been reported. If you spotted it first, help us to smash it by providing a detailed and welcomed feedback.

Do not contact contributors directly about support or help with technical issues.

Credits

Authors

Camptocamp SA

Contributors

Alexandre Fayolle <alexandre.fayolle@camptocamp.com>
Maksym Yankin <maksym.yankin@camptocamp.com>

Maintainers

This module is maintained by the OCA.

OCA, or the Odoo Community Association, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Odoo features and promote its widespread use.

Current maintainer:

This module is part of the OCA/project project on GitHub.

You are welcome to contribute. To learn how please visit https://odoo-community.org/page/Contribute.