How To Reduce Resource Planning Costs?

In many consulting firms, the workload is distributed "at best", under the pressure of the schedule, rather than according to the skills that can actually be mobilized. But when a resource is unsuitable for the project, productivity deteriorates, and the gaps widen between the forecast and the actual. The problem is that these additional costs are not always visible in the reports.

Day after day, you see your margin slip without immediately understanding where it is being lost. Your PMO finds itself multiplying emergency arbitrations. Your consultants, on the other hand, switch between overload and intercontracts (or bench time). One bad resource planning always ends up being expensive and represents on average several points of gross margin over a year.

On the other hand, the IT Services and consulting firms that know how to position the right people in the right place, taking into account their real workload and the skills available significantly improve their ROI. This is the case, for example, of Cegid, which has recovered 3 points of gross margin in twelve months thanks to a centralized management of the resource planning and better allocation of resources.

In this article, we'll show you how Measure the cost of your resource planning, measure the impact of hidden costs on your business, and how to better allocate your resources and secure your margins.

What are the costs associated with resource planning?

The costs of the resource planning are divided between visible expenses (management time, tools, coordination, etc.) and hidden costs related to discrepancies between real needs and resource allocation. These discrepancies have a direct impact on resource productivity, project margin, and the ability to track consultant utilization rates.

What are the fixed or "expected" costs of resource planning?

The Fixed costs of the resource planning group together expenses directly related to the day-to-day management of resources. They include:

• the ADR Individuals responsible for management: The managers of resource planningThe operational managers, project managers, or PMOs need to plan, adjust, and track assignments;
• Hardware costs : scheduling software, time tracking, leave or assignment management.

In a IT Services, the fixed cost of the resource planning can thus represent several tens of thousands of euros per year, even when the processes are well structured.

What are the hidden costs of resource planning and how can they be detected?

These 6 hidden costs of resource planning represent the invisible face of project management.

1. Poor skills matching: the affected profile does not have the skills necessary for the project. Work progresses more slowly and its tasks will potentially have to be resumed;
2. Under-resource planning : the team cannot absorb all the tasks, leading to fatigue among employees, and which can turn into absenteeism and turnover. For the firm, this translates into delays, unplanned hours and a loss of reliability in delivery;
3. On-resource planning : Too many people or too qualified people are assigned to the project. Their ADR is not compensated by the value created, whereas the billable utilization rate Decreases;
4. Poor anticipation of the inter-contract: inter-mission consulting resource management has a direct impact on the project margin and profitability per consultant;
5. Lack of visibility on availability: in the absence of a consolidated view of availability, arbitrations are made too late and often result in an emergency recourse to subcontracting, or the refusal of missions that are nevertheless profitable;
6. Disconnected tools: Fragmented management across multiple files or platforms leads to multiple entries, loss of data reliability and planning errors.

These costs explain a large part of the discrepancies between the forecast and the actual performance of a project. Unfortunately, they are hardly visible in the reports.

To reveal them and act before they accumulate, firms rely on an integrated system (such as Stafiz) that Connects resource planning, workload, availability, billing, and margin on completion. Drifts become actionable alerts and measurable performance levers.

What are the hidden costs of resource planning tied to human resources?

Your decisions of resource planning have a direct impact on your HR performance. Each assignment error, each break in a trial period or each demotivation linked to poor positioning creates cascading costs: loss of productivity, additional deadlines, managerial overload, early departures, etc. The ability to retain and anticipate skills needs is based on a resource forecast that aligns workload, availability and employee development. This is one of the keys to limiting financial losses.

What are the financial challenges of a good recruitment?

According to the Mercato de l'Emploi, a recruitment error represents a direct cost of €20,000 to €50,000 (publication of the advertisement, interviews, training and payment of any allowances).

These costs are magnified in the IT Services and consulting firms, where each employee has a project portfolio and billing potential. In some cases, this loss amounts to up to €150,000 per failed recruitment, including indirect costs such as:

• a refusal of a position leads to a delay in the start of the project, a forced reorganization of the resource planning and a weakening of the customer relationship;
• a break during the trial period, which will have mobilized several managers and experts to train the newcomer, and requires a relaunch of recruitment;
• a recruitment to be renewed including a new sourcing, selection and onboarding campaign, as well as an overload of the teams who must temporarily absorb the load of the vacant position.
• Business opportunities not being seized because they don't have the skills available at the right time.

The importance of employees' professional development

The commitment of an employee depends largely on the coherence between his missions and the development of his skills. What happens when a consultant is not positioned on the projects adapted to his expertise or his background?

• He is not sufficiently committed to his work, because the project does not correspond to his skills or his career plan. This leads to a drop in the quality of renderings, a drop in productivity and a need for training to catch up on skill gaps.
• He may want to leave out of weariness, which will represent a loss of know-how for the firm and a break in continuity on its projects. In addition, it will take a significant amount of time before its replacement reaches the same level of performance.

How can you reduce turnover costs? 

When skills needs are well anticipated, the costs related to employee departures (loss of productivity, new recruitments, overloading of teams) are greatly reduced. The key: having a reliable view of skills, career aspirations and workload to adjust the resource planning continuously.

KPIs to track 

Certain indicators make it possible to identify the risks of disengagement before they turn into costly departures. They are directly integrated into the management of the resource planning.

• The duration per employee on the same mission: a prolonged presence on a single project can generate fatigue and a drop in commitment. Promoting controlled turnover exposes employees to other contexts and accelerates their progress, while strengthening their retention.
• Wishes for skills to be mobilized: Collect the skills that the employee wants to develop to guide their future assignments. The information is then integrated into the resource planning, when load and budget constraints permit.
• The possibility of juniorisation : this indicator identifies the missions on which a junior profile can replace a senior. This interest is twofold: to accelerate the development of the skills of junior profiles and to mobilize seniors on expert subjects with higher added value.
• Gaps between skills and needs make it possible to reveal future tensions in terms of training, early recruitment and re-resource planning.

To limit the costs associated with these HR risks, teams need to be able to predict their resource and skills needs

The process in practice 

Among the most effective practices observed during our customer support:

• Weekly review on the duration spent on the missions: Programming automatic alerts in the event of exceedance allows blockages to be addressed as early as possible and to readjust the resource planning and to prevent dissatisfaction from setting in.
• Matching between open needs and employees: visualizing workload and availability in a consolidated way accelerates the identification of the right profile. Time-consuming manual searches disappear, and forgetting relevant profiles is avoided.

• "Career" approach and upsskilling: in order to promote internal mobility and employee satisfaction, set up micro-courses of 2 to 4 weeks to fill gaps in customer expectations and retain key profiles.
• Update employees' wishes regarding the skills to be mobilized each quarter: although this is not always possible to take into account because of the priorities imposed by the resource planning (respecting deadlines and budget), integrating the employees' appetites into the process is a good reflex: a written record will allow us to follow up, unlike an oral exchange.

Stafiz allows you to indicate this in the profile of employees so that they can stand out when the profiles are assigned by the managers, or to notify themselves that a project interests them. 

Lack of visibility into capacity planning: what it costs

One Steering of the resource planning Without a clear view of current and future capacity, your company is exposed to major financial risks : deteriorating margins, lost productivity, missed business opportunities, etc. Without reliable data on load and availability, each decision is made in reaction to the hazards encountered during the project, and is therefore more expensive.

This lack of visibility leads to poor resource planning projects and prevents the utilization rate of consultants from being properly tracked. In the long run, this translates into unnecessary non-billable costs and a dilution of the project margin resource planning.

The challenge of total visibility on the current capacity...

Without real-time visibility into the capacity of teams, it becomes impossible to identify who is really understaffed or overstaffed.

• The sub resource planning Represents a risk of burnout and reduces retention, because the load exceeds the available capacity.
• The over-resource planning represents a risk of bore-out, associated with a progressive demotivation and a risk of employees leaving.

Good visibility on total capacity in real time helps to reduce the risk related to turnover, and to avoid emergency recruitment or subcontracting, which is often costly. This macro view tells you whether:

• The skill is actually unavailable;
• The competence is currently mobilised on a less priority mission;
• The skill can be acquired by an employee at the end of a short training course.

Good skills management contributes to reduce the costs of the resource planning and improves the quality of arbitration.

… and a view of upcoming availability 

The lack of visibility into future availability directly affects your future revenue. If you can't anticipate when your capacity is lower than customer needs, you risk finding yourself understaffed on a key profile at the worst possible time. If you have not calibrated your needs earlier (training, recruitment, subcontracting), some profitable missions will have to be refused.

When the sales team doesn't know when a skill will be available again, they can't:

• nor planning the signing,
• nor secure the start,
• nor promise a coherent schedule, because the availability of resources is not known.

A reliable forecast load makes it possible to anticipate dips and peaks in activity several weeks in advance, which drastically reduces late arbitrations and avoidable mission refusals. This provisional view of availability makes it possible to:

• initiate training before the skills are lacking,
• to schedule a recruitment before the situation becomes critical.

Firms that have this visibility transform reactive management into strategic management : they sell what teams can actually deliver, when they can do it, and stabilize their forecast while preserving their profitability per project and resource planning.

What is the impact of the billable utilization rate on profitability?

Visibility on the load on projects makes it possible to anticipate the risks of overruns and therefore to proactively prepare negotiations in order to avoid losses on the margin. A dedicated tool also tracks consultant utilization rates, automatically updating billable and non-billable time to anticipate margin deviations. The Follow-up to the utilization rate also provides a detailed understanding of the consultants' actual hourly productivity, revealing the exact proportion of time valued.

The earlier we give visibility on the risks of deviations, the better the client will be able to negotiate rather than noting the delay or costs at the end of the project 

Increase utilization rate to reduce costs

In France, the Rate of resource planning average is around 78%, i.e. the majority of the consultant's time spent on billable activities. With better load tracking, it is possible to aim for more than 80%, and our customers regularly reach 85% thanks to fine control of the resource planning.

Increase your billable utilization rate +3 to +5 points is enough to generate several hundred thousand euros in additional turnover, without recruiting. To achieve this, we are implementing 3 levers of action in Stafiz.

A real-time dashboard

This dashboard helps you understand in real time: 

• where the load is concentrated;
• cases of under-resource planning,
• overload situations (in the "red"),
• the risks ahead for the next few weeks.

In Stafiz, cases of under- or over-charge are easily identifiable. 

Please note: the non-billable charge must be excluded so as not to distort the analysis and allow arbitrations at a glance.

Make it a weekly review tool

A weekly review of past and forecast rates allows:

• measure the gap between the objective and the actual trajectory of a project or a project portfolio;
• Identify performance by team or department.
• adjust the resource planning before the billable utilization rate collapses;
• to provide managers with reliable data to manage their projects.

This review transforms load indicators into a tool for action, not just reporting.

Structure that mixes teams with cross-country resource planning

Mixing teams facilitates the optimal use of skills and reduces reliance on outsourcing. Organize meetings of resource planning allows you to match the needs between the different missions or teams.

Customer Use Case: +5 utilization rate in 10 weeks

This consulting firm with 400 employees, present in France and abroad, was facing a lack of visibility on its workload and availability.

The objective: to ensure that each division has the target profiles at the right time, thanks to a formalized process of requesting and allocating resources.

Earn points from resource planning Today

What does a 3-point increase in resource planning ?

Imagine a company with 100 employees working 220 days a year for a ADR of 1000€.

Increase the rate of resource planning By 3 points means increasing the number of billable days by 3%. In our example, a gain of 3 points of resource planning generates +€660,000 in additional revenue per year :

• Additional billable days per employee:
  220 × 3% = 6.6 days
• For 100 employees:
  6.6 × 100 = 660 days
• Additional revenue:
  €660,× €1,000 = €660,000 / year

+3 points resource planning = 3% more billable days, therefore more turnover, without recruiting or increasing fixed costs, i.e. several hundred thousand euros of additional turnover, only thanks to a better allocation of resources.

The financial impact of poor management of the resource planning

Poor project resource forecasting prevents you from having a clear view of the breakdown between billable and non-billable activity. It is impossible to anticipate the productivity of consultants; and, by extension, to project your turnover.

Without an accurate view of the true cost of a project resource, it is impossible to effectively manage your margin, nor to reduce the non-billable costs related to the resource planning. This situation creates two major problems.

1. Inability to understand where the load really is: If multiple employees are working on internal projects at the same time, without global visibility, the company is unaware that its billable capacity is decreasing. This leads to late trade-offs, poorly managed "off-peak periods" and unavailable resources to respond to business opportunities – even though they are on a non-priority mission.
2. Poor management of the non-billable: Visibility on the non-billable expense is a critical lever for optimizing the billable utilization rate. In particular, it makes it possible to maintain consultants as a priority on billable projects and to plan internal activities (training, R&D, organization, support) in strategic periods, consistent with the seasonality of the activity.

Precise management of your resources allows you to reduce non-billable hours and improve the margin of your management company. This management of non-billable costs is central to project management: without a clear distinction between productive and internal costs, it becomes impossible to optimize profitability and allocate resources efficiently.

The right process 

Here are 3 best practices for transforming the resource planning as a lever for profitability.

• Calculation of all "completed" KPIs: you must take into account what has already been achieved, the rest to be done (internal costs) and be able to calculate your net increase, even in the case of purchases or additional costs.

Margin tracking by costs to completion in Stafiz for reliable real-time profitability reporting

1. Updating the workload schedule regularly by the project manager (usually weekly or monthly) in order to obtain a reliable projection of costs and consolidated visibility on the workload of employees.
2. Use automatic alerts to take action before the project drifts. If the alert warns that the projected margin is likely to deviate by 15%; The project manager and the practice manager are immediately notified and can act in anticipation.

These alerts create proactivity and protect the margin before it is eroded, which is not negligible in guaranteeing the profitability of the missions 

Customer Use Cases

This Cegid software integrator with 115 employees suffered from a lack of visibility on its project margins and overly reactive management. After 12 months of using Stafiz, the company has recovered +3 points of gross margin, thanks to these 3 levers.

• Workload schedule updated monthly: the margin at completion is continuously recalculated, providing precise visibility on the evolution compared to the initial budget.
• Integration of margin targets into bonuses : project managers are directly informed of the financial objectives associated with their projects, which ensures consistency between operational monitoring and budget expectations.
• Automatic alerts: Drift risks are detected in advance and escalated immediately to management, allowing for quick corrective actions.

Monthly review of project portfolio landings : This long-term visibility allows the firm to negotiate with clients earlier to correct work overloads and rebalance the load before it impacts margin.

What does +1pt of gross margin represent?

+1 point of gross margin = 1% of your turnover in additional profitability, without hiring and on a like-for-like basis. That's why you can even gain 0.5 points of margin just by taking control of your resource planning can be a huge improvement depending on the size of the company.

How a resource planning Can it help maximize profitability?

One resource planning for consulting companies completely transforms the way IT Services and consulting firms manage their workload, their skills and their margins. With centralized project portfolio management, resource planning No longer on a project-by-project basis, but on a project-by-project basis, which immediately improves the consistency of trade-offs and overall profitability.

The result: more reliable decisions, fewer contingencies, and better protection of profitability per project.

With full project visibility

One resource planning centralises all the essential data to manage the load:

• clear distinction between billable and non-billable charges ;
• consolidated view of availability and assignments ;
• Automatic update of key information (load, leave, intercontract, subcontracting).

By interfacing with CRM, ERP and HRIS, the platform offers a 360° view of projects:

• on the commercial side: real availability of skills to validate a proposal,
• on the finance side: clear vision of projected margins and internal costs,
• on the HR side: skills, levels and developments integrated into the resource planning.

This unification makes it possible to automatically generate project profitability indicators, to be monitored in real time or in forecast. Managers can thus anticipate drifts, adjust the load and negotiate with the customer before the margin is impacted.

With proactive features... 

A specialized tool like Stafiz doesn't just centralize data: it allows you to act faster and sooner thanks to these two features.

1. Compare forecast vs. actual: Load, cost, or planning variances appear immediately, without waiting for the monthly review. When a project starts to consume more load than expected or availability changes, the alert rises in real time. Adjustments can then be made gradually, rather than abruptly correcting a drift that has become too great.
2. Automate assignments: The tool analyzes the required skills, availability, employee preferences and workload constraints to propose the best profiles in a few seconds, which eliminates the "wanderings" of resource planning.

… that allow for better project planning

All of these features transform project planning. By bringing all data together in a single tool, companies have a reliable and shared view that facilitates short-, medium- and long-term decisions. This data consolidation makes it possible to optimize project resource planning, ensuring that each skill is mobilized at the right time and at the right cost.

The management of the utilization rate becomes more precise: each manager visualizes in real time the billable time, the non-billable hours and the inter-contract periods. This transparency makes it possible to better distribute the load and avoid imbalances between teams.

The tool also makes it easier to manage the bench time of a consulting company. Employees at the end of their assignment are identified in advance, which gives time to anticipate their next positioning: commercial activation, internal research, move on to another project, or skills development. The result: less benching, and more internal mobility.

Planning can be done with an adapted granularity: in days for fixed-price assignments, in hours for projects under direct management or one-off interventions. The tool also allows outsourcing to be integrated into the same view as internal resources, eliminating blind spots and reducing biased decisions due to an incomplete view of actual capacity.

Conclusion: what was only a time-consuming administrative process becomes a real strategic lever. The resource planning finally aligns operational capabilities with your company's business ambitions IT Services, secures margins and contributes directly to the overall performance of your business. Structured management of the resource planning thus becomes a major lever of performance and profitability for a consulting firm, well beyond a simple administrative exercise.