Merlin – utilization or work of an assignment

When to enter a work or utilization percentage for the assignments in my Merlin projects?

Short answer on this is, when ever your planning requires it.
For a more detailed answer please check the activities on the screenshot and our explanations hereafter:


Case A
You have a task (activity A) of 6 days of work and need to assign half of it to your resource. Your resource should work for those 3 days by its full day capacity.

To schedule it in Merlin… Continue reading

Merlin: Assignment’s Work vs Utilization

When having an activity requiring a specific amount of work and want to assign this to a resource, you can consider the following possibilities:

  1. You assign the complete amount of work to the resource and use its complete work potential (Assignment on Activity A)
  2. You assign part of the work amount to the resource and use its complete work potential (Assignment on Activity B)
  3. You assign the complete amount of work to the resource and use a part of its work potential (Assignment on Activity C)

MerlinSchnappschuss011

Which possibility should you choose? The most appropriate of course 😉

It depends on what you want to do. If you want the job to be done by just this one resource, you can apply the settings of ‘Activity A’ from above sample.  If you want to assign part of the work to this resource and the rest to another, you should choose the second possibility.

If you want to make sure that your resource has free capacities (15%) for other activities while working on this one, you may adjust its utilization as shown in the third possibility. Of course by doing so, the expected duration of this task gets longer.

Easy, isn’t it?