Sometimes you plan activities in projects, which can be done by equipment. Machines or computer which may run unattended, do not need regular working hours and can work 24h a day, 7days a week.  Surely you have assigned real person as resources for activities in the past and you know how to do this in Merlin, but how to proceed when having equipment resources?

The good news? This is as easy as setting up person resources.

Supposedly you need a Mac Book Pro for a certain task. First you create the new resource, change its type in the inspector to “Equipment” and switch to the “Working Time” pane.

Now you can select “24 hours” as base calendar.

The Mac Book Pro is from now on a 24 hours and 7 days a week resource for this project. You can assign it to a 3 days activity and see Merlin calculating the expected duration as 1 day. This makes sense. According to the project settings 1 working day equals to 8 hours.

We have defined a work of 3 days, meaning 24 hours. Our computer can work 24 hours, so this activity can be completed within 1 computer day.

What would have happen in case the activity would need 5 days?  How much expected duration do you think Merlin would display for this resource? We do not need to guess, we can calculate it. The work was entered as 5 days, 5 days x 8 normal working hours would need 40 hours. Our Mac works 24 hours a day, so it needs 40/24 = 1,67 days (2 days rounded up).

Check the truth of our calculation in the Merlin project if you like.

As you can see, Merlin displays an expected duration of 2 days 🙂