The Operations Leader’s Balancing Act
As an operations leader, you are always worried about making sure you have enough resources to do the work, but not too many so that they are then sitting idle and driving down your utilization rate.
When you have responsibility for staffing in a dynamic environment, the concepts are pretty simple; Economics 101 and common sense say in equilibrium, supply will equal demand. But, unless you can predict how much demand there will be, that theory is not much help to you for day-to-day resource planning.
You need to know when there will be a surplus of capacity so you can work with business development to try and improve the opportunity pipeline. Or, when new business is going to over tax your team, you need to secure short-term resourcing solutions and maybe recommend that recruiting be ramped up.
But even with a good grasp of all this, what if the skills of the available resources are not what you need for the high probability opportunities? You are thinking about this right? And not just for next week, because the further out you are looking, the better you are managing your business.
NetSuite OpenAir’s PSA software is an excellent solution to help solve this problem. Once you make the investment, you will have at your disposal all of the data necessary to understand your business’s resource capacity. With this in hand, you should then not just be collecting and storing your data but using that information to understand and plan for your business’s future. However, if you are spending your time pulling and manipulating the data in Excel, you should know there is a faster and more efficient way.
Kenway’s new Revenue & Resource Insights and Optimization service gets you out of the data manipulation business and into the analysis and taking action mode. Using your organization’s existing OpenAir data, our enhanced reporting and analytics help you immediately see if you have areas where booked hours exceed capacity (excess demand) or if capacity outstrips bookings (excess supply). You can drill into this data further by understanding how this breaks down by role to then analyze your capacity needs. On top of that, you can run contingency plans by asking, “What If?” You can remove projects to see how supply will increase if a potential project gets lost. And conversely, you can use a “What-If” parameter to see how increases and decreases to demand will shift your net capacity available.
In our recent blog post, “Is Data Really ‘The New Oil’?”, we highlighted how crucial it is to use your data to make business decisions and how important that can be for growing your organization. Our feelings remain the same. If you are not capturing as much data on your business as possible, and then leveraging that data into information to help make decisions, you are missing out on a crucial way to make better decisions.
Kenway’s team of Data Analytics experts understand how to leverage your business’s existing information to help position your organization for future success. We can help you gain powerful insights in real time that enable you to proactively take control of your business.
If you’d like to learn more about our dynamic new solution or request a complimentary demo, reach out to us at info@kenwayconsulting.com.