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. Â 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.
Merlin supports many types of resources. They are:
Person: equivalent to a worker or individual.
Company: Contractor (group or individuals), suppliers, etc.
Equipment: Machinery, tools, etc
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:
One of the benefits of using Merlin is tracking resource utilization*.
Just take a look in the Gantt chart  of the Utilization view. Color coded bars and percentage information visualize overall resource utilization in the current scale of the timeline.
Related to this feature, we often hear from customers who wish to customize the threshold levels controlling the yellow-green-red colors.