Staffing your manufacturing project in the fewest steps with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise

Note: Thanks to John Keane for the thorough testing of this functionality.

A project resource is a human resource (a.k.a., a person) that is going to execute a certain portion of a project. We have to define these resources and then book them or assign them. The difference between these will become clear soon.

Many industries can be mentioned that would use Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise (D365FOE) and have a need to work with project resources. Professional services firms are the most obvious case, where the project resource is the "asset" that generates revenue. These projects would typically be time and material projects.  Engineer to Order manufacturing industries are also a perfect example, where the design engineers are our project resources. They would typically not generate billable hours like in the professional services industry. These manufacturing Engineer-to-Order projects would be fixed price. Later we will explore a project manufacturing industry example where engineers are assigned to design tasks in the Work Breakdown Structure.

A complete overview of the functionality is found here.

As you will see in the above documentation, there are a few different ways to staff a project. This article will show the most direct way: assign a WBS task to one or more project resources.

An indirect way of staffing is by creating resource requests that are then "fulfilled". This requires more steps and I don't think it is suitable for Engineer to Order manufacturing companies. It would be more common for professional services companies where multiple people are involved in staffing a project.

The reason for this article is to provide ...