Why the Labor Cost Generation not Autogenerating for Resource Assignment

[Konstantin7]

We are setting up to migrate from Resource Plan to Resource Assignment. When we are using Resource Plans, the Cost Plan is generated when the Resource Plan is created and approved. For the Resource Assignment, it requires the user to manually click the 'Generate labor cost' button in order to generate the Cost Plans. 

What is the recommendation of automizing the cost plan [generate labor cost] creation similar to the Resource Plan works?

[Attila Beregvar]

Hello Konstantin,
I'm not sure if you have tried the BR approach, but we did for a client with huge data sets (big projects, many resource assignments, hundreads of thousends of allocation records in the background) and because the labor cost generation is designed to re-scan the whole cost plan structure every time there is a change - instead of just doing delta updates for new entries - it can kill the performance, completely locking down the session and killing user experience. 
So far we havent found any better solution then the scheduled job, but this would be a very crucial improvement point for ServiceNow to tackle.
Hope this helps!

[Namita Mishra]

Hello @Konstantin7 ,

Let me first share the reason behind this architectural shift of cost generation.

In the legacy resource management, a Resource Plan was serving as a planning as well as a financial construct, so creating a cost plan automatically when a resource plan was approved was relatively straightforward. In essence 1 resource plan will always be tied with one cost plan.

However, in the new way of working, we have shifted to attribute-based planning. For this conversation let's focus on the attribute based financial planning.

The new model generates labor cost based on combinations of planning attributes such as:

• Employee Type
• Role
• Expense Type
• Any other custom-defined planning attributes

This means a single resource assignment creation may generate multiple labor cost plans based on different attribute combinations.

On top of this user can

• Resources can be reassigned.
• Hours can be redistributed across months.

and every change can affect labor cost.

Therefore, automatically recalculating cost plans on every assignment update would create significant processing overhead. The platform instead lets customers control when cost plans are generated.

I believe this makes it clear that BR would negatively impact when you have large number of resource plans or if the user is frequently making the changes as also mentioned by Attila.

Important Point: Please note that creation of the BR may also result in potential future upgrade conflict because out of the box we have  not designed to trigger labor-cost generation synchronously on every assignment update.

So, I would recommend NOT to create the BR for synchronous cost plan creation.

Hope this helps and if it does, please mark the response as correct.

Happy SPM Journey!

Thank You!

Namita Mishra