Improve resource capacity planning decisions
How to make better resource capacity planning decisions for your organization
Making the best resource capacity planning decisions
How to make the best capacity planning decisions for your business
In uncertain times businesses need the ability to make informed decisions about resource capacity planning. How can capacity planning be improved?Smart businesses should make the most of data that allows managers to make informed decisions about what middle to long-term capacity planning will look like.
Timewatch’s WhiteSpace® scheduling product provides your business everything it needs for your managers to plan current and future projects efficiently.
What are the capacity planning decisions?
- Does your business need to hire more staff?
- Do you need to get more efficiency from your existing employees?
- Who do you have with a specific skill that is available next week?
- Who has skill X, has previously worked with Customer Y, and is available in two weeks?
- What will change in three months?
- What will change in six months?
- What will change tomorrow?
These are problems that Timewatch solves for its customers. Our job is to give you the data to make your business more efficient, take away the stress from upsize or downsize decisions, and give you the right information to make scaling your business a breeze.
In a 2021 work environment where staffing availability can change in an hour we have added simple one-click tools to our scheduling systems where managers can find the most suitable and available staff member to come off the bench and ensure a project remains 100 percent on target.
A staffing challenge that could involve multiple phone calls, several text messages, calendar checks, calendar double checks, is now super easy.
Our simple tools make capacity planning easy
Need someone to cover for a day? Easy. Just click on the date and sort availability for the required time period. Find a replacement employee in a few clicks.
If you need someone with 35 hours over the next couple of weeks, that’s easy too. Click on the ‘refine view’ button, enter a ‘Capacity Search’ of 35 hours and click ‘Go’. The view will show just resources with the availability you need. It’s that easy.
Hire more staff or reduce capacity?
What are the strategies of capacity planning?
Capacity planning is a challenge. Do you need to hire more staff in six months? Or will you need to rethink staffing requirements and reduce capacity? We can help you decide the best path. Look at your calendar for the next few months and gain insight on your future needs now.
For in-house schedulers, WhiteSpace® provides the ability to view multiple resources simultaneously. A scheduler can see which resources are doing what, where, when, and where they have free ‘whitespace’ in their calendar.
Resources can also be grouped by skill, type, location, timezone, or any other grouping your organization needs. Resource grouping ensures searching for the “best resource for the job” is simple, quick, and efficient.
In the real world, this means that your staff is deployed more efficiently and your human resources are better managed.
“Matching the right resource to a job is easy when people’s calendars are empty, but gets progressively harder as schedules get busier. Faster and more adaptable recourse skill searching and availability filtering means schedulers state the resource attributes, skills and date and time they are looking for and the system recommends the best-suited person available for the role,” explains Vaccaro, “Unless all resources are 100 percent utilized, there is always an answer. Sometimes resources need to be juggled around, but the system helps with that too.”
Advanced Features Make Capacity Planning Even Easier
“Working life changed for everyone in 2020”, says Anthony Vaccaro, senior product specialist at Timewatch. “We responded to our customers’ needs by adding a range of new scheduling features to help companies more rapidly adjust schedules, more easily find available time slots and analyze and increase resource utilization.”
Utilization heat maps tell you everything you need to know about staff availability, and intelligent scheduling tools help you make bookings for the right resources. Configurable skillsets allow schedulers to easily search and filter resources, making it easier to find resources needed, and capacity sorting and filtering show only resources with capacity. It all adds up to the simplest, easiest, and most accurate way to find the best resource with the necessary capacity to get the job done.
Outlook and Google integration tools then ensure scheduled booking information gets into employee’s calendars without anyone lifting a finger.
Better use of your existing human capital means your business does not necessarily need to make new hires to successfully meet your current and future business demands. By increasing ‘bookability’ of resources through better scheduling, customers have increased utilization between five to 10 percent. That’s like getting a free new hire for every 10-20 employees.
WhiteSpace® is available as a cloud product (which we recommend for all our software) or on-premises. It can be fully and seamlessly integrated with Office 365 to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook calendars.
WhiteSpace® also forms the scheduling engine of Time&Space®, our complete professional services automation solution.
Learn More
If you would like to speak with someone about our resource capacity planning systems can help your organization, please contact us using the form to the right.
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