Step 2 - Use a Global Variable

Variables are always used in calculations within a transform column, which means they can be used either inside of a cluster or a pricing sheet.

Let’s take the following Concrete Labour Team cluster as an example of how to use a variable. The unit of measure for this cluster is a day and you will see that it is made up of a cluster, which contains a drive unit and poker as well as the petrol it uses, as well as two labor resources, a foreman and a general worker resource.

Also, note that both labor resources are paid per hour, so to transform their allowable to a day rate we have to multiply by the number of hours they work, in this case, nine hours:

A different way of doing this is to use our Shift variable, so that if the Shift hours change we can just change the variable instead of individually changing the calculation for each resource.

So, instead of having the calculation on foreman be *9[hrs/day]*1[workers] it will be *S*1[Workers]:

If we now want to change the hours to for example 9 or 10 on both resources, we can simply adjust the value of the Shift variable: