Services Resource Planning

Optimize your service-driven business

As a service-driven organization, your revenues come from delivering talent and expertise when and where it's needed most. Your product is your people. How effectively you can maximize their potential, align demand and capacity, heighten responsiveness, and manage your engagement pipeline can determine a good year from a bad one.

The Problem: A Planning and Execution Gap

Services organizations operate in a workflow from quote – when opportunities enter the lifecycle – to cash – when fees are invoiced. CRM and ERP solutions address the front and back ends, respectively.

But in between, where resources and projects must be planned and managed, those systems don't help you efficiently prioritize resources, assign tasks to appropriately skilled personnel, maintain optimal staff levels, and derive a clear understanding of project costs and value.

What results is a planning and execution gap that many try to bridge with complex, inaccurate, or manual processes, inadequate tools, and patched-together or bolted-on systems not designed for the task.

And at the end of the day, when a high-value client calls with an unexpected opportunity, most are still forced into the challenging routine of phone calls, spreadsheet cross-referencing, and educated guessing to deploy the worker with the right skill set – with little insight into how that will affect current and forecasted projects, and their associated revenue and margin.

The upshot: these approaches, and the gap they leave, promote inefficiencies that directly impact your organization's ability to respond quickly to customer and market demands, optimally align resource levels with project requirements, anticipate future resource requirements, and manage costs associated with engagements.

The Solution: Best-Of-Breed Resource Management and Project Delivery

Planview Enterprise helps you close the gap, balancing demand against delivery to drive more revenue, and to do so more profitably.

The Planview Enterprise solution for Services Resource Planning gives you the power to make optimal use of resources, and analyze thousands of resources throughout an organization. With this best-of-breed solution that seamlessly integrates with leading CRM and ERP systems, you can:

• Manage potential and active engagements with equal insight
• Assess and manage demand across a broad array of projects
• Deploy cross-functional teams to deliver services to internal and external customers
• Plan resources across globally distributed teams
• Pool resources by role, expertise, and location to deploy the ideal team in every engagement
• Forecast demand and allocation across pools, and create resource templates for common engagements
• Enable enterprise-class reporting by tying advanced analytics to resource consumption trends
• Easily deliver reliable revenue forecasts every quarter

Take Control of Demand

Planview Enterprise gives you the tools to accurately identify project requirements and assess engagement scope, with a centralized location to:

• Request work
• Check status
• Delegate requests
• Review lifecycles

These capabilities give you an accurate assessment of committed and forecasted work, to eliminate the painful fire drills caused by under- or over-staffed projects, which threaten overall performance, efficiency, and margin.

Maintain Optimal Capacity Levels

Only by accurately monitoring your organization's capacity can you effectively balance resources against customer demands. Rely on Planview Enterprise to:

• Understand how capacity and demand align across various resource pools
• Highlight where resources are lacking and where excess capacity exists
• Dynamically plan and deploy resources where the need is greatest or the margins are highest to get the work done most cost-effectively and to the highest standards of client satisfaction

Commit Resources with Confidence

Planview Enterprise helps you ensure that the right resources are assigned to specific engagements. Create resource pools based on various attributes, such as expertise, roles, location, and according to various financial and resource lenses. Then create custom resource templates designed to address common engagement scenarios, arming you with time-saving yet relevant responses when those engagements enter the pipeline.

Planview Enterprise gives you an interactive, real-time view of supply and demand. This dynamic approach means that when you need to move resources in flight to accommodate higher value clients or more urgent work, you know exactly how other existing projects, offices, and revenue streams are affected, so you can optimize your backfill resource choices.

The Planview Enterprise solution for Services Resource Planning also equips you to:

• Assign work efficiently
• Develop a skills pipeline
• Cultivate staff areas of interest
• Keep staff productive and billing
• Improve forecasting through use of a framework based on roles rather than individuals
• Ensure that short-term changes in personnel don't impact ability to deliver for customers

Optimize Performance for Every Engagement

Planview Enterprise lets you scope, schedule, and execute work across all of your resource pools to manage projects more effectively. Advanced analytics and reporting give you new capabilities that drive performance throughout the engagement lifecycle, so you can:

• Better understand actual costs and project value of each engagement
• Track and report time worked and expenses against specific projects
• Track and manage risks and issues such as work slippage
• Track and display performance and trend analysis information on work, resources, and KPIs
• Measure and forecast revenues by engagement, practice, office, or across your organization

Integrate with and Get More from Existing Systems

Planview provides seamless integration with the CRM and ERP systems you have in place today. Through the Planview OpenSuite product line, Planview provides
out-of-the-box interoperability between Planview Enterprise and the enterprise systems you rely on every day. This transparent platform easily delivers connectivity to more than 200 enterprise applications, like ERP and CRM, and makes integration with homegrown systems a snap.