Hi there,
we're evaluating Odoo 19 on the "one app" plan with "Project". We like to go for the "all apps" plan once we get a hang of Odoo. If there is some functionality in other apps that would help us with our issue, please tell us.
The Issue:
We have not yet managed to plan a project in regards of utilization of workers. While planning the work items of a project, we would like to see, if we set up a worker with more hours at any given day then they can handle. Either for just one project, or in account to everything.
The Gantt view (19.2) somewhat does that, but we have two gripes with it:
- The indication of x/y Hours on the left of the gantt view depends on the timeframe of the whole gantt view and does not give an indication weather someone has far to much work on a single day. This could work for work shifts but is not feasible for projects.
- It appears that there is a functionality that checks how much time needs to be spend on a single day, but only if there are atleast two work items for one person on one day, where both of the items have a duration and hours needed set.
Example for the two issues from above:
I have one worker that is on a 40hrs a week (or 8hrs a day) plan. I can give him a task that runs only one day and requires 100h of work. Gantt view says that is fine because:
Effect one: My current view of the gantt diagramm is a couple of months long, the indicator on the left is fine with it, as the worker only has 100/260hrs set, even though all the work happens on one day and the 260 hrs are for multiple months.
Effect two: The work Item itself only appears to go through some check if the hours are to long IF there is another work Item on the same day. Only if I drag another work items on the same day to the same worker am I able to see the red triangle. It never appears without concurrent work items.
As we are not familiar with Odoo we believe to be missing something:
- How are we supposed to do plan multiple work items across multiple workers and know if we have a valid utilisation plan or not with this behaviour?
- Are there other views, tools, options, etc. we should check to better see the utilisation of workers?
Hello,
The Project Gantt view is designed primarily for milestones and deadlines, not necessarily for workload balancing.
Have you reviewed "Planning" app for this? This is Odoo’s dedicated tool for worker utilization.
If your business model relies on strictly managing human hours (like an agency or engineering firm), the Planning app is essentially a requirement.
Let me know if you want more help for this
Thank
I have browsed the docs and identified "planning" from the documentation: https://www.odoo.com/documentation/19.0/applications/services/planning.html?highlight=planning
I just browsed through it again, but as far as I can tell without installing the app ourselves, I do not see how it woul help us here. Maybe Planning can do more then the documentation shows, but Planning appears to be designed for shifts. Shifts do not have the fundamental complexity in terms of data needed here.
A shift is 1:1 in terms of realtime and needed time. Task assignment does not work like that and needs to validate, if what is set is reasonable. We would need to know, that a worker has to much work assigned exactly while we are in a gantt view, or any other view that lets us:
Does "Planning" realy help in that regard?
As you described your about your requirements which clear that Planning app is not fit for your requirements.
Based on my understanding:
Odoo Project with customisation. Project gives some based features but live validation, capacity awareness and smart assignment is still missing.. you can adapt it using customisation.
Please correct me if I am not understand your requirements.
Thanks for the reply, I am smarter about Odoo already.
In my view Odoo somewhat does already have the logic and data needed. It does take into account the working hours of employees (based on the working hours I can define) and it does check if the employee does have enough working hours, per day, across multiple tasks and projects to do the job. I have checked that very thing multiple times and watched it happen red triangles appearing and all. It however only applies those rules (or shows that information) once atleast two work items battle it out on the same day.
In my book, the script that checks the daily utilisation (which is probably always triggered, because in "one project gannt view" or "all project gantt view" it does take all other projects and their tasks into account already) need to give a valid output of utlisation even if there is just one input of work items on one day. There probably is some logic in that very check to either depend on multiple work item inputs or the code tree running on just one work item is buggy. Most likely the code that checks weather the utilisation is to high depends on another check that is only true if there are multiple work items at once.
I have done some digging now with my limited capailities:
It appears the check I am referring to is
filter: "dependency warning"
and 'highlight_conflicting_task'
and something like "Aufgaben in Konflikt" aswell which translated into english should be "tasks in conflict" or similar.
It appears there is functionality that is rarely used or not well known that could be of very great use to us, but is defunct now. I say defunct, because it is easy to complety crash the correct working of those checks or filters. I have set one work item with one total hour in another project for one person, and spaned it around the whole year. Then I put multiple work items with over 100 hours on the same day for that same person and was missing any check that anything might not be planned right in the gantt view.
So it is hard to make out consistencies, but easy to see that this does not work as intended or atleast is flawed. Then again, I am novice in Odoo and might be turning all the wrong buttons?
Now I am between a rock and hard place. We do not yet have support and my workplace won't allow me to dig around potential technical issues in software we aren't even using yet.
If you are aware about Odoo very well then it is very easy for you. But I think you are stuck somewhere, right?
Well, I have in fact not crashed the whole thing, just found more weird behaviour:
The check of to much working hours is not applied on a tasks (direct?) subtasks. So If I have a person that works 8 hours a day, I can give him 100 hours in one task (because the check does not work on just one task), and then 100 hours from each subtask (because it won't check that either).
If I have a different task and start this two days before the task in question, up untill 16 hours on that new task everything will be fine according to the gantt view, even if the planned timeframe of the tasks overlap. Just if one hour overfills from that new task (say with 17 hours) to the one with the 100 hours already, will the whole thing tell me that this won't work out.
That can not truly be the intended behaviour, right?
Odoo currently detects scheduling conflicts only when multiple allocations overlap. It does not validate total daily workload against an employee’s working hours if only a single task (or subtasks) is involved. Subtasks are also not aggregated into a parent task for capacity checks. As a result, overload situations can go undetected unless overlapping allocations explicitly trigger the conflict logic. This makes the current system conflict-based rather than true capacity-based planning.
Your observation is correct ..