Merlin – Expected work for material resources

We run a building company and want to be able to create a project file in Merlin that says it takes 2 hours to build 1 square Meter of brick work.
Now when scheduling a task of 10 square Meter of brick work, Merlin will know that this task will take 20 man hours. Is this possible?

Yes, this is possible when scheduling your projects with Merlin on Mac OS X. You can create a material resource by a default utilization of 4m^2/day (1m^2/ 2 hours => 4m^2/ 8 hours  )…

MaterialResource

…and a task with no work or duration entries on which you assign this ‘brick’ resource. As soon as you enter those 10m^2 as work onto the assignment, Merlin will calculate an expected duration of 20 hours.

UsingAMaterialResource

That means, you just check the value of expected duration and see how long it would take to build those 10 square Meters.

Merlin: Material units for resources

Merlin supports many types of resources. They are:

  • Person Icon Person: equivalent to a worker or individual.
  • Company Icon Company: Contractor (group or individuals), suppliers, etc.
  • Equipment Icon Equipment: Machinery, tools, etc
  • Material Icon Material: Raw materials, supplies.

Materials differ from the other types in that they don’t do any of the work on which they are assigned to and have an option for you to determine their measuring unit. For example, you can choose the material unit “kg” , and your standard rate becomes cost per kg.

If you like to use another unit (‘piece’ for example ) than the pre-defined ones, simply type it in the appropriate text edit field of the inspector:

custom material units