Are you interested in Profitability? Productivity? Performance? Well guess what, all three of them depend on your resources. The quality of your resources impact your company’s performance; their allocation and management impacts productivity; and considering resources are usually a company’s largest overhead, they play a huge role in determining your profitability.
Hence, using a good resource planning software is a no brainer.
When running a business, managers often make the mistake of placing resource management within the framework of project management, and often believe that their project management processes or software will take care of their resource management as well. However it is critical that resource management is considered separately as it is a different way of looking at an organisation, and has a different objective. The aim of project management is to ensure that each project is delivered on time and within budget, irrespective of whether all resources are being used most optimally. Therefore, it is important that companies also approach their business from a resource management framework. This way they have a bird’s eye view of their resources and make sure they maximise their utilisation across divisions, projects and activities; and can plan and manage their resources effectively, smoothly and with simplicity. The question is how?
Most businesses leave this job to division or team managers, or dedicated resource planners. These planners and managers then struggle to allocate resources and produce reports manually with the assistance of spreadsheets and word processers. However in today’s competitive markets, smarter businesses are moving towards using resource management software that removes the extensive time, frustration and sometimes confusion that can come with managing a company’s resources.
The main objective of such software should be to enable a company to:
1. Find the right resource for the right job based on its qualities, experience and availability.
2. Maximise the productivity of existing resources through effective allocation to various jobs and activities, aiming for 100% utilisation.
3. Forecast future resource requirements against resource capacity in order to plan ahead to allow the smooth functioning of business activities.
A good resource management software should support your business holistically, and in its short, medium and long term objectives.
In the short term, it should enable a company to easily plan and schedule resources by quickly identifying the right resource. This should be simple to use and easy to understand visually so that you can find the right resource from a big pool based on skills, training, role, quality, availability etc and allocate it against various projects, milestones or tasks. Managers should be able to create and address resource requests, and share resources across divisions and teams with little hassle. Finally, you should be able to plan your resources in whatever metric your company desires be it hours, days, shifts or percentages, and should also be able to integrate leave, holiday, planned and unplanned tasks.
In the medium term, management firstly needs to be able to accurately forecast future resource capacity against resource demand, to allow your business to identify the shortfall or excess of resources and accordingly plan ahead. Secondly, it is important to know the performance of your existing resources, and thus ensure that there are time sheet and costing mechanisms that allow for the tracking of costs and billing of time against what is forecasted. Finally it is important that this information can be easily analysed and communicated in visually effective graphs and reports, which can also be easily analysed in detail, or exported into different formats. This often drastically improves a company’s ability to make intelligent decisions.
In the long term, resource management software should be able to support your business in its long term strategic objectives. We often have an unfortunate tendency of prioritise what is urgent, even if it isn’t as important as making a longer term investment in our company’s strategic direction. Hence a good resource management tool should enable you to also integrate and prioritise resources for longer term objectives, not simply short term activities or medium term projects.
Finally the best tools of all should be able to tailor a tool to your specific business, based on your objectives, processes and metrics, and should be reasonably priced. If a tool isn’t suited to your company or is too expensive, then what’s the point?
This leaves us with the final question – do such tools exist out there that do all of what has been said, and yet are cheap and easy to use? Yes they do. There aren’t many tools out there, however is SAVIOM Resource Planning and Scheduling Software does, so make sure you have a look and make an investment for your company that you won’t regret.
Author Resource:
SAVIOM is market leader in Resource Planning & Scheduling software . This software is quite affordable and easy to use.
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