8 reasons to use resource planning software

Everyone working in a large organisation knows that each project could only be successfully managed by properly planning its resources. When we talk about resources, we have many aspects in mind: technics, equipment, premises, IT assets, time and people, of course.

While there so are many parts included in the project, we must control each of them to get the full picture of what we have to do. Fortunately, today we have a structural, easy and fast way to get our projects successfully done by using resource planning software. In this article we will give you 8 reasons why it’s worth to use it.

1. Clear distinction of each employer’s responsibilities

A proper resource allocation helps the company to make the best use of each employee skills to complete tasks. In other words, it’s crucial to take into account each person’s skill sets in order to avoid any lack of clarity about who does what in the team. With a resource planning system all the tasks could be easily assigned to the best people for the job. As a result, this would lead employees to feel more valuable asset in the company, as everyone does the best she/he knows about.

2. Save Company’s Budget

One of the major advantages resource planning gives is an opportunity to structure all the data to take better advantage of it. As it was mentioned previously, a proper distribution of tasks to different people with different capabilities helps the company to save costs associated with rehiring or changing the teams’ structure. Also, effective resource planning allows the company to use fewer resources (equipment, IT assets, time, etc.) in producing the desired outcome.

3. Improve Time Planning

Another important aspect of successful project planning process is to know how much time each employee needs to complete tasks. Timer function is included in many resource planning systems and it helps to have a more accurate picture of actual and future working hours. This feature is especially needed in large teams, where projects are larger, as well as the number of needed resources. Resource planning software shows where your team members are assigned and what tasks they are working on. Also, it helps to estimate the needed time for similar projects in the future, as well as every project team member could plan his/her individual tasks more precisely.

4. Manage All the Information in One Place

We all know that every company plans its capacity and demand levels in advance. However, they tend to change, no matter how accurately they were planned. With unexpected changes, which almost occur in strongly growing companies, distribution of materials, labour and equipment has also to be changed. This process could be easily implemented with a good resource planning software, where the entire information is centralized and given in one data format. This feature allows assigning resources by dragging and dropping them with only a few clicks.

5. Predict the Future

Most of the resource planning systems have a magical function, called “What if”. You may have heard about this function during IT lessons at school, when we were unable to understand the need of such a complex Excel option. Nowadays, “What if” analysis, included in resource planning software, enables companies to visualize the predicted outcome on costs and labour. By using this function, companies can test various scenarios and see the outcomes of their decisions right before making any actual strategical decisions.

6. Save time for data analysis

Probably each of us has been ever worked or still working on Excel spreadsheets, updating and moving data around. We also know how much time this process takes away from us and sometimes the whole data remains undefined. With proper use of a resource planning system, we can save more time for data analysis, as the system generates different data with one click.

7. Visualize Your Plans

We can compare resource planning process to a puzzle – we cannot keep in mind every piece of the puzzle without seeing it. The same rule could be applied to resource planning: it is much easier to control the whole process and make proper decisions if we can see everything on our computer screen. Furthermore, all the project tasks could be grouped according to the time and the whole workload of each person could be visible in one place when using a resource planning system.

8. Ensure Employers’ Availability

We all have ever been in a situation while one of the key team members, needed for a project, has dropped because of planned or unplanned leaves. Resource planning software could solve this problem by centralizing all the data (including assigned employees), needed for a project implementation. With proper resource planning, we could track the existing and future commitments of the whole team, planned vacations and even we are able to see the unplanned vacation and sick days. The system could tell us automatically if a resource is unavailable and help us to avoid conflicts in project implementation.

After we came along the main advantages of resource planning, you may realise now that this process is crucial for the smooth running of any business. Even a resource planning software is not the only way to get things done in the company, it is one of the easiest solutions to get greater visibility into your organization‘s resources and schedules and to improve the performance of every project of your team.