How to choose your resource planning tool ?
To begin with, let's define what a resource planning tool is: it's a software program that enables you to identify the right profiles for a particular project or requirement, assign them to that project and, more generally, monitor the workload of your employees. There are several resource planning tools on the market, but it's imperative that you choose the one that's right for your business: you can't manage resource planning for a warehouse the same way you manage resource planning for a consulting firm. First and foremost, therefore, you need to identify the solutions that are best suited to your needs and your industry.
What criteria should you take into account when purchasing a resource planning tool that's right for your business?
Profile search
Be able to search for profiles by entering criteria and specifying the timeframe of the need The right resource planning tool must allow you to easily search among your profiles with all the criteria that are important to you:
The skills
Skills are often key criteria when looking for profiles. Every profile in your database, whether candidate, employee or subcontractor, 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.
Availability
When you're looking to staff a profile, it's usually for a specific period of time. But it doesn't have to be full-time for the whole period: it can be on specific days or at specific times, over a period but not 100%, or only on certain days of the week. Cases vary, and your tool resource planning tool must enable you to meet these criteria.
The experience criterion
It's often useful to include experience in a search: has this profile ever worked on a project for this customer? Have they already worked on this type of project? This allows you to refine your search with profiles already trained in the subject, and to respond ever more effectively to a customer's needs.
Preference criteria
Finally, if you can take into account the preferences of your profiles, this provides particularly interesting information. Using this criterion can help you retain 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.
Assigning employees: giving employees and management visibility
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.
Visibility for employees and connection to calendars
It's important to give employees visibility of their schedules and objectives. So when management assigns an employee to a project, the resource planning tool must notify the employee or subcontractor. Ideally, the briefing associated with this assignment complements the information on the schedule. Employees should be able to easily access their schedule by logging on to 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.
Visibility and control for management
On the management side, it's the global views that are most valuable. Filtering by role, by team and knowing who is assigned to what. The resource planning tool must make it easy to reassign work from one employee to another, and to shift assignments from one date to another if the project is running behind schedule. A clear view of planning, availability and workloads must be available to managers.
Rights management is very important here: how much visibility can the manager be given? All company profiles or just those of his team. If the resource planning software allows, levels of rights can be defined.
Better capacity and load management
Making it easier to take needs into account
Employees, whether sales representatives or project managers, must be able to create requirements for resource planning, by meeting certain criteria, and these requirements must be directed to the people in charge of resource planning. This implies that the resource planning tool offers a "need creation" function, which allows users to indicate :
- Competence 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.
Measuring capacity through load scenarios
One of the great advantages of resource planning tools is their ability to anticipate. They provide a vision of potential capacity shortfalls, and indicate what recruitment needs to be carried out. They should also enable us to plan for future workloads, taking into account the entire workforce: customer projects, internal projects, absences, and projects that may come on stream in the future.
Depending on the scope selected, the impact on workload may change. Ideally, you can pre-staff profiles on projects that are still in the pre-sales phase. Depending on the percentage chance of success, the additional workload is taken into account. In this way, you can read the forecast workload and decide whether or not to take pre-sales elements into account.
Smooth out the load 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.
As well as boosting productivity, good workload management also increases employee satisfaction.
The plus that makes all the difference: integrate resource planning with the financial forecast
Keeping track of 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.
Calculate project margins
If your resource planning software allows you to set up costs behind each user (a salary for an employee, or a cost price for a project-specific supplier), then load management will enable you to calculate the future profitability of the project. If you can staff subcontractors and indicate their purchase price, it's even better, because you can forecast production and the future cost of subcontracting.
Other costs will also impact your project: product purchases, travel expenses that cannot be re-invoiced, etc... To have everything, make sure that the resource planning solution you've chosen allows you to do so. For actual costs (time already spent): if your resource planning solution also manages time spent, then it's just as simple: a single solution to manage everything. If not, you can connect your timesheet tool to your resource planning tool for actual and forecast data.
Even so, native integration of actuals and forecasts is the ideal way to avoid the data problems and other bugs that connectors can sometimes cause. All that remains is to read the project dashboard and check whether the recalculated forecast profitability is close to target, or whether the project margins are drifting off course.
Connect the resource planning tool to the ERP system
Project and work-in-progress updates need to be integrated into the ERP system on a regular basis. Ideally, employees work in a simpler, more intuitive solution such as resource planning, before the data is automatically sent via API to the ERP. The finance functions can then take over to prepare the closing of accounts.
Stafiz helps you gain visibility and better manage your resource planning and project progress thanks to real-time data. The software takes into account costs and financial KPIs. Stafiz is a SaaS solution for 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.
