Using an element structure

You can define a parent-child relationship between any two elements in your project. The parent element is at a higher level than the child. Parent-child relationships can be one-to-one or one-to-many. On the basis of parent-child relationships, you can create a multi-level, tree-like hierarchy of elements. Typically, many elements in the hierarchy act both as parents (to lower-level elements) and as children (to higher-level ones). You can enter budget lines only for elements that are part of the element hierarchy.

Child elements and frequency

You can define a one-to-many parent-child relationship where the parent contains the same child a number of times.

Example

For a construction project, you create a parent element heating to contain 40 occurrences of a child element radiator. You specify a frequency of 40 when defining the parent-child relationship for the two elements. By defining the resources required for the budget lines of the radiator (element), the resources can be established using the formula:

frequency * resource quantity

For example, to install one radiator you require 0.5 hours of labor, resulting in 20 hours to install all the radiators (40 * 0.5)

Header elements

In your element hierarchy, you may want to include some elements whose only role is to provide a grouping structure for child elements at lower levels. For this purpose, you can create a special type of element - a header element - with the Header Elements (tpptc1101m000) session. A header element contains only a code, description and search key. You cannot enter budget lines for a header element.

Top element

This is the term applied to the element at the highest level in an element structure. For any one project, you could create several sets of element structures, whose elements are unrelated to one another. You specify which element structure you want to use for the project by specifying its top element in the Budget Top Element field of the project definition with the Projects (tppdm6100m000) session you can also define multiple tops.

Progress and cost recording

The ability to create a multilevel hierarchy has two important results:

  • Progress information can accumulate from an element at a lower level to an element at a higher level. See To use progress recording.
  • Actual cost information can accumulate from an element at a lower level to an element at a higher level. See To use costs.

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