The 5 advantages of integration that change everything!
The best-managed project teams are those that share clear visibility of workload planning. This ensures that work is well distributed and that collaborators are not either over-staffed or under-staffed.
A tool from resource planning provides this visibility and simplifies planning and workload management, simplifying assignment and optimization work.
Many teams manage this using Excel, while others use dedicated software. So why does this process need to be connected to the rest of activity management? What's the point of connecting the resource planning tool to the activity management tool?
Here are the 5 major advantages of interfacing these tools natively:
Benefit 1: Increased visibility to make better decisions
The right resource planning tools provide complete visibility of schedules, team workloads and employees. They also enable us to propose the best optimization decisions: choosing the right profiles to position on a project according to a maximum number of criteria. The employee's capacity, experience, skills and even preferences.
The following data are used in ERP or HR software and can be automatically transferred to the resource planning solution:
Absences
Drawing up a workload schedule without knowing who is on leave or who has stopped work is an impossible exercise. It is absolutely essential that leave data is up to date in the resource planning solution. Either your resource planning tool also manages leave and sends the data automatically to the HR tool, or the HR tool connects to send the information and adjust people's capacity according to their absences.
Project experience and track record
If your resource planning software allows it, you will be able to identify the best profiles based on their experience. For example, if you are looking for someone who has already worked for a client to facilitate the work, you will be able to enter this requirement into the system to better identify the appropriate profile. This information has already been entered into the activity tracker, since the employee has probably confirmed that he or she has already spent time on the project or completed tasks.
Employee preferences
The right tools at resource planning allow you to improve employee retention by taking employee preferences into account. For example, if someone wants to work on a marketing project to gain skills in that area, the resource planning tool allows them to indicate this and will consider it in searches as needed. By leveraging this information, your resource planning tool becomes the number one tool to help your employees grow and maintain their satisfaction. This type of information is valuable, and it should also be easily available in the HR tool, along with the rest of the employee's data.
Employee work history indicators
These are their utilization rate, the breakdown of time spent on customer projects, internal projects, inter-contracts... These are all important data for assessing an employee's performance. They are available in the resource planning tool, which must be able to transfer them to the HRIS, or can be accessed directly by management.
Advantage 2: real consistency between project financial management and workload management
Good project management involves regularly updating the work remaining to be done on the project, to ensure that the forecast remains in line with the initial budget. This update is generally the responsibility of the project manager, who must estimate the remaining work to be done. However, in most activity management tools, the work remaining to be done is totally independent of the collaborators' workload schedule. In this way, the project manager confirms the time remaining to be spent on a given task, but does not allocate it to the collaborator who will carry it out, nor does he indicate over which period the work will be carried out.
This means that another input step has to be carried out in the scheduling tool to plan the associated workload. This results in wasted time, double entry and often inconsistent data.
Ideally, your resource planning tool is natively connected to your activity management tool, and the update of the "reste à faire" automatically updates the workload and employee capacities. The project manager kills two birds with one stone, by updating his project to calculate the margin forecast, and updating the employee workload forecast. Data is reliable, consistent and updated in real time.
It is even possible to let the employee (if he or she has the right) update the time remaining to be spent on these tasks. The impact on forecast profitability is automatically adjusted and the project manager notified.
Stafiz helps you to manage your resource planning and to better control the workload of your employees. Get a more complete overview of the different profiles, their experience and availability, so you can assign them to missions that suit them.
Advantage 3: Provides an accurate business forecast, updated in real time
To run a service business (consulting, IT Services, agency), it's essential to have a clear view of the sales and margin forecasts for the coming months. This helps to ensure that the forecast remains in line with objectives, or if not, to identify the projects that are causing the discrepancies.
However, the best way to assess the sales and cost forecasts of a service company is based on the workload of its employees. An activity-specific resource planning tool integrates the costs of each employee, and enables you to calculate how the project will progress, and the sales and costs recognized over the coming periods.
Forcasting using resource planning software is therefore far more precise than calculating the remaining work to be done in a conventional ERP system, which does not take into account the precise evolution by resource and by month.
Thanks to this data, the resource planning tool will enable:
Indicate the turnover and margins, by project and by team in the next periods
Send information to your ERP (or, if it is itself natively connected to manage the business, to do so autonomously)
Calculate the differences between an updated forecast that takes into account what has already been achieved and the initial budget of a project
Benefit 4: Greater employee visibility and satisfaction for improved talent retention
If you've completed the previous steps, you're now in a position to analyze your forecast TACEs and the gap between them and your targets.
The war for talent is not a new concept, but it is becoming ever more intense as the phenomenon of the "big resignation" progresses in parallel. To make more sense of talent, we need to give them ever greater visibility and flexibility in their career choices.
Giving them greater visibility over their next projects and task schedules with a resource planning tool is a first step. On the other hand, enabling employees to proactively position themselves on projects that interest them on this same platform is a further step that resource planning tools like Stafiz make possible. Last but not least, taking into account employees' preferences and wishes in the resource planning arbitration process offers a real advantage over competitors who don't take this approach.
Being better considered and better oriented towards projects that enable them to grow within the company and find meaning in their work is the best way to increase employee retention.
Advantage 5: No double entry and a lot of time saved!
A great deal of data is systematically entered into resource planning and ERP tools:
Employees: enter their name and date of entry. As soon as the departure date is known, it must also be added, to avoid the employee being assigned when he or she will no longer be available. All this information is generally entered into the activity tracking and/or HRIS software. Once the resource planning tool has been connected, the data is updated automatically, so that it is only entered once, but is taken into account in both programs.
Teams: to better manage team workloads, you need to know the breakdown: to which team each employee belongs. Here again, this information is automatically entered into the activity tracking software. There's no need for double entry if the connectors are already in place.
Competency files: some HRIS tools allow you to integrate an employee's competency or experience file. The right tools at resource planning will enable you to exploit this data and update it in line with the projects your employees are working on.
The algorithms of the resource planning tool then exploit this data to propose the most suitable profiles and facilitate resource optimization.
When choosing a tool for resource planning, make sure that the activity and management of resource planning are natively linked, or if this is not the case, by default, that there are connectors between your solutions.Discover the Stafiz solution, natively connected to accounting and payroll software such as Sage, SilaeExpert, Cegid or Nibelis.
