Finding the Right Application for your Resource Scheduling Needs

Effective planning and control of resources and processes are essentially seen as major success factors in any organization be it a manufacturing concern or a service firm. Since a last couple of years, companies have put great efforts towards developing several approaches of planning, controlling processes, and managing changes over time. Technology based computing systems and resource scheduling software since their inception are implemented in order to cope with the evolving needs of decision making at all the operational, tactical and strategic levels. This is indeed occurring in line with the changing trend observed in customers’ requirements, environment as well as improvements in technology.

Finding the Right Application for Resource Scheduling

Hundreds of organizations are observing the need for optimizing resources which would help them achieve strategic objectives and gain complete visibility to resource management as well as skills. By implementing such advanced systems, organizations shall be able to ensure that the right and adequate resources are being working on the right appropriate projects; essentially on the basis of real time project timelines.

However, lack of resource allocation and management software system could defer visibility to resource management needs and would certainly impact overall resource utilization including skills, interests, experiences as well as availability.

Essentially, a suite of web based computing tools for resource planning, allocation and scheduling as well as work planning are available which creates the support mechanism and provides high value to the organization. These advanced solutions are usually targeted to specific business requirements and answers to several complex planning questions such as – Which is the most adequate resource to be picked and could be used and many more.

These solutions provided are also dependent on the complexity of work as well as it also takes into account the fact that whether it is being applied to a single activity or to the entire work organization.

As it has been observed that resource allocation and planning software tells organization about where there professionals are, how many hours are available for billable jobs and what are they up to; there are some other key features which are essentially needed to consider which in turn improves resource utilization.

Forecast and Allocate Resources Proactively

• View, manage and outlook resource utilization with the aid of interactive reports.
• Automated resource utilization alerts addressing challenges and expectations
• Driving full time employee forecasts and staffing process with resource placeholders

Streamline Bookings and Resource requests

• Allocation and tracking of resources by defining multiple booking types such as internal, requested, confirmed matching the business needs.
• Allocation on the basis of different timeframes in integration with Google Calendars and MS-Outlook
• Mapping customized workflows
• Automatic e-mail notifications for any new, modified or deleted resource
• Facilitates insert, modification, and deletion of bookings of multiple resources on a single project.
• Booking of resources to projects in bulk is also possible
• Allows project coordinators to demand for specific resources in booking requests
• Ease in adjustment, swapping, and deletion of resources on the basis of utilization and staffing needs.
• Creation of bookings at task/project level
• Management of booking requests in bulk.

Advanced Skill Searching and Skill Tracking

• Assembling of advanced skills is possible on the basis of demographic information, language, expertise, interests, experience, preferences, capabilities and many more.
• Creation and management of customized skill set matching the requirements
• Custom views of skills profiles and custom filters of several specific parameters; all resources are seen at once.
• Conducting advanced resource searches in order to find the right people on the basis of multiple factors including skills and availability.
• Quick filter of resources on the basis of single attribute is also possible on the basis of skills, department, job code, education and many more.
• Facilitates flexibility in viewing and searching all active and inactive resource which even further includes contractors and specialty resources
• Viewing resource utilization in Google calendar view as well as in graphical chart view

Another considerable fact is that investment in such advanced resource planning and scheduling software systems are important and generate high value on investment. Indeed, resource scheduling software reduces management’s dependency on spreadsheets used for resource management and eventually provides real time tracking, centralized and up-to-date resource profiles to be used for projects.

And eventually provides an opportunity towards managing single and dynamic pool of resources which in turn optimizes teams in projects and even improves utilization rates.