How to choose your resource planning tool ?
To begin with, how do you define what a tool is? resource planning : it is software that makes it possible to identify profiles suitable for a project or a need, to assign them to this project and to monitor the workload of employees more generally. There are several tools for resource planning on the market, but it is imperative that you choose the one that corresponds to your activity: we do not manage the resource planning of a warehouse as we manage the resource planning from a consulting company. Above all, you must identify the solutions that are best suited to your needs and your industry.
What are the criteria to take into account when looking to acquire a tool? resource planning suitable for your business?
1. Employee profile search features
Being able to search for profiles by entering criteria and specifying the temporality of the need The right tool for resource planning should allow you to easily search among your profiles with all the criteria that are important to you:
a. Skills
Skills are often key criteria when looking for profiles . Each of the profiles in your database, whether they are candidates, employees or subcontractors, must have up-to-date skills. Not only the list of these skills, but also their level on each of them.
These competencies should be updated by the profiles themselves, automatically through a connector with your GPEC tool, or with a simple data import.
b. Availability
When you are looking to staff a profile, it is generally over a specific period. But it is not necessarily full-time for the entire period: it can be on specific days or times, over a period but not 100%, or only on certain days of the week. The scenarios vary, and your resource planning tool must allow you to meet these criteria.
c. Past experience
It is often useful to integrate experience into a search: has this profile already participated in a project for this client? Has he ever worked on this type of project? This makes it possible to refine the search with profiles already trained on the subject and to respond ever more effectively to a customer's needs.
d. Employee preference
Finally, if you can take into account the preferences of your profiles, this provides particularly interesting information. Using this criterion helps promote the retention of your employees. By allowing them to indicate what type of project they would like to work on, you make it easier to take these wishes into account in your assignment and improve employee satisfaction. A real step towards employee satisfaction and retention.
2. Employee allocation: visibility for employees and management
The resource planning tool must also give full visibility to teams: employees should have a complete view of their schedules and managers should be able to easily assign employees to projects and tasks based of these schedules.
a. Visibility with calendar integrations
It is important to give employees visibility on their schedule and objectives. So when management assigns the employee to a project, the management tool resource planning must notify the employee or subcontractor. Ideally, the briefing associated with this assignment complements the information on the schedule. The employee must be able to easily know their schedule by connecting from their mobile app.
Resource planning software connected to employee calendars makes the scheduling process even more smooth. When the platform connects to these calendars, schedules can be modified from both ends: from the platform to the calendar and from the calendar to the platform.
b. Visibility and authority for management
On the management side, it is the global views that have the most value. Being able to filter by role, by team and know who is assigned to what. The tool of resource planning must make it easy to reassign the workload from one collaborator to another, to shift assignments from one date to another if the project is behind schedule. A clear view of planning, availability and loads must be available to managers.
Rights management is very important here: what visibility can be given to the manager? All company profiles or just those of its team. If the software resource planning allows, rights levels can be defined.
3. Improved capacity and workload management
a. Easy communication of needs
Employees, whether salespeople or project managers, must be able to create management needs. resource planning , by meeting certain criteria, and these needs must be directed to the people in charge of the resource planning . This implies that the tool resource planning offers a “requirement creation” functionality which allows you to indicate:
- Skills criteria
- Experience criteria
- The charging period
These needs must be directed to the people in charge of addressing them, as an exhaustive view of current needs is needed to make the right decisions. Thus, when employee profiles fit several needs of the company, the resource planning tool must alert managers to help decide the most suitable project for the employee.
b. Capacity measurements through effective scheduling
One of the great advantages of tools resource planning is that they bring anticipation. They provide an overview of possible capacity gaps and indicate which recruitments need to be made. They must make it possible to plan the future load, taking into account the entire occupation: customer projects, internal projects, absences, projects that could be started.
Depending on the selected scope, the impact on the load may change. Ideally, you can pre-staff profiles on projects that are still in pre-sales. Depending on the percentage chance of success, the additional charge is taken into account. You can thus read the forecast load by deciding whether or not to take pre-sales elements into account.
c. Appropriate distribution of workload to increase efficiency and productivity
Optimized distribution of workload is the key factor for success in improving the efficiency and productivity of teams. Tasks must be allocated as much as possible among employees to avoid bottlenecks and delays. Being able to identify these bottlenecks at a glance allows managers to reorganize the work.
In addition to a gain in productivity, good workload management leads to an increase in employee satisfaction.
4. The plus that makes all the difference: integrating the resource planning with the financial forecast
a. Monitor future production
By assigning profiles to projects or tasks, you systematically carry out the financial forecast without necessarily knowing it. A resource planning tool with project accounting functionalities can bring you even more value.
- Calculate the progress of a project and the associated turnover
- Calculate the impact of forecasts on profitability
- Ability to send all elements to an ERP for updated forecasting
Then, you can eliminate the repetitive process of manually updating forecasts when schedules shift.
b. Calculate project margins
If your software resource planning allows you to configure costs behind each user (a salary for an employee, or a cost price for a supplier specific to the project), then load management will make it possible to calculate the future profitability of the project. If you can staff subcontractors and indicate their purchase price it is even better, because you can predict the production and the future cost of subcontracting.
Other costs impact your project: product purchases, non-rebillable travel costs, etc. To have everything, make sure that the solution resource planning chosen allows it. For the achieved (the times already passed): if your solution of resource planning also manages past times, so it's that simple: one solution to manage everything. Otherwise you can connect your timesheet tool to your resource planning to have the actual and the forecast.
Having a native integration of the actual and the forecast remains ideal to avoid data problems and other bugs that connectors can sometimes cause. All that remains is to read the project dashboard and check if the recalculated forecast profitability is close to the objective or if the project margins are deviating.
c. Connect the resource planning tool to the ERP tool
Updating projects and what remains to be done must be regularly integrated into the ERP. Ideally, employees work in a simpler and more intuitive solution such as the resource planning , before the data is automatically sent by API to the ERP. The finance functions can then take over to prepare the accounting close.
Stafiz helps you gain visibility and better manage your resource planning and your project progress thanks to real-time data. The software takes into account costs and financial KPIs. Stafiz is a SaaS management resource planning , project management and Business Intelligence. So budgets and margins are always respected and you make better decisions for your business.
To find out more about the Stafiz platform, visit the dedicated page.
