It sounds like you are looking for a feature that MS Project does not have. It treats machines as “resources” with work-hour limits, just like human beings. It does track the machine’s work hours separately, but there is no separate classification for machines. If two people and one machine are working on a task, then MS Project sees that as three resources working on the task.

I am curious to understand what problem you are experiencing. Treating a machine as a resource is pretty standard practice in scheduling. You can group together your machines in resource usage reports by creating custom groups in your resource sheet. What is the harm if MS Project considers the machine as another resource in the task?

–Al

Thanks for your time and response. I think I did not make my question clear. The two operators are using the machine to complete the task. Hence the machine does not share the manual work with the operators. When I add the machine as a resource, MSP considers it as a resource equivalent to the operator, which is not correct. I want to indicate that the machine is just an equipment and want to find for how much time it is utilized. The machine should not share the work with the operators. Is there a way out?

The problem you are running into is the problem of fixed work vs. fixed duration tasks. I wrote in detail about the problem in my article about taking control of MS Project. You probably have your tasks set up as “fixed work” tasks. MS Project will keep your work-hours the same whenever you add a new resource. When you add the new machine to the task, MS Project keeps the number of work hours the same and reduces the duration of the task — no what you probably intended.

You probably want to change your task type to fixed duration and NOT effort driven. Then when you add a new resource, the duration will stay the same, and MS Project will calculate the work needed from that resource over the whole duration of the task. More details about the settings are in the article above.

I hope this information helps. Let us know if you have any other problems.

–Al

Have you tried updating the resource’s individual work calendar in the resource pool file? That should override any settings in the individual project plans.

Just to be safe, I would close down any of the master projects and child projects, open the resource pool, make the change to the calendar, close the resource pool, then open the master project or child projects. That should make the resource work a 37.5 hour week, instead of a 40 hour week.

Frankly, though, I do not recommend using the resource pool feature combined with the master project features. I have found too many calendar-related problems when using all these features together. It sounds like you may be outgrowing MS Project desktop, and require an MS Project Server installation. Alternatively, you may want to explore just maintaining one large MS Project file, instead of using all the masters and children. Another alternative is to abandon the master file, and use milestones to keep the different child schedules in sync with one another manually.

I wish I had a better answer for you. MS Project definitely gets a little unpredictable in these kinds of situations.