Activities are the work to be performed with a time duration. This can be minutes, hours or days. Activities can be added to cards or collections. Time can also be written on these activities.
This article explains how to create an activity, how the preferred resource and performance of a resource works for a particular activity, and how to archive or delete an activity.

You can add a new activity quickly and easily. Go to Settings in the left menu bar of vPlan and then click Activities under the heading settings. You will now see an overview of existing activities. Activities that are included in your ERP system will already be visible on this page. To manually add an activity, click the green Add activity button at the top right of the page.
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You can add a description, code, type, standard duration and maximum duration per day to the activity. Finally, you can set a preferred resource and the performance per resource for this activity. You can read how preference and performance work in the next chapter.

The name of the activity as it is shown in vPlan.

A code, often used for integrations. This field is not mandatory.

If your activity always takes the same amount of time, you can already enter a standard duration here. If you enter a default duration you do not have to enter this manually for cards with this activity.

Sometimes a machine can run for 24 hours, or an employee has a day schedule of 8 hours. You can set per activity how long the activity can be performed per day. If you then schedule a card that lasts longer than the standard time, the card will automatically be split over several days. For example: you can perform the activity 'sawing' for a maximum of 8 hours per day. If you plan a card with 24 hours of sawing work, vPlan will automatically plan this card on three days.

An activity always has a type, namely employee, machine or room. This determines to which resource the activity can be assigned. It will also affect the capacity of this type of resource.

Click on Save to permanently add the activity.
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You can add unlimited activities. Activities must be linked to a stage in the planboard in order to use them. This will be explained in the article about the stages.

It is possible to link one or more resources as a preferred resource to an activity. When you enable the 'Automatically assign' option, vPlan will automatically link the resource to the card if the activity is also present on it.

Example: you have the Design stage, which includes activities such as DTP and Artwork. Jonas (DTP) and Ferdi (Art director) work on the Design stage. You can link the Jonas resource as a preferred resource on the DTP activity. If you enable the 'Automatically assign' option, the Jonas resource will automatically be linked to the card when a card with the DTP activity is planned for the stage.
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​It is possible to link multiple preferred resources to an activity. When you go to the relevant resource in the configuration, you will also clearly see that the resource has been set as a preferred resource for an activity.
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It is also possible to set the performance per resource for an activity. You can do this if, for example, an employee is faster in a certain activity than another employee due to more experience.
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In the example below we say that Michel's performance on the 'Assembly' activity is 200%, and Inge's is 50%.

Order 10199 has the activity 'Assemble' with an estimated time of 4 hours.

If you assign Inge as a resource to this card, vPlan will automatically adjust the estimated time to 8 hours, because Inge's efficiency is at 50%.

If you assign Michel to this card, you will see that the activity 'Assemble' only takes him 2 hours.

If you want this activity to be carried out by both Michel and Inge, the time is divided by the joint efficiency. The total estimate is then 3 hours and 12 minutes. How this is calculated can best be explained with an example:
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​Inge and Michel have to make four cakes together. By default, a person makes one pie per hour. In this case Inge makes half a cake per hour and Michel makes two cakes per hour. If you divide it, Michel would make his two cakes in an hour and Inge would make her two cakes in four hours. But they share the four pies. After one hour they have made 2.5 cakes together, after two hours they have made five cakes. Together they then took 1 hour and 36 minutes to make all four cakes. Because this was done with two people, a total of 3 hours and 12 minutes was spent making four cakes.
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The moment you remove the resources or move the order to the backlog, the estimated time will be adjusted back to the original estimate. In the case of the example above, this will be reset to four hours.

If you no longer want to use activities, you can archive them. This immediately makes them invisible in the design of your boards and you can no longer choose them when planning tickets. The history of tickets planned in the past is preserved.

To archive activities, go to Configuration in the left menu bar of vPlan. Then click on Activities under the heading configuration. You will now see an overview of existing activities. Select one or more activities you want to archive using the checkboxes at the front of the line and click the Archive button at the top.

The activity will now disappear from the list of active activities, but also from your planboard if the activity was linked there.

If you want to restore archived activities, you can make them visible by enabling the Archived filter button at the top of the page.

Then click on one of the archived activities (do not check, but click on the title) to open it and you can unarchive it, or delete it permanently.