Resource Optimization Through Forecasting
Resource Forecasting
❝ Resource forecasting is predicting your future resource requirements. RF is How many staff do you need next month? Next quarter? Next year? Should you be increasing your sales efforts to secure work to keep everyone occupied, or can you take on more people to meet demand? ❞
A resource forecast is an estimate of the resources and effort that will be required for the project, which helps determine the project hours, project budget, and the project estimate put forward to the client.
Resource forecasting lets you balance your staffing levels over time and match them to the pipeline of incoming work.
Advantages
- Improved forecast accuracy for products and product families.
- Forecasting and Optimization techniques provide features and functionality that expand and enhance (support) the Advanced Planning functions
- Decision-making, plan review and parameter definition can all be improved and often automated when Forecasting and Optimization tools are applied
- By applying these Forecasting optimization techniques, the retailer’s ability to manage a localized customer centric retail environment is improved.
- Involves future events
- Most Business use to quantitative method (Forecasting), particularly in planning and budgeting.
- Classifying product groups based on historical tendencies
- Improved understanding of internal and external casual factors affecting your product portfolio
- Improving project delivery will help diminish expenses and increment edges. Research demonstrates that organizations that have executed a PMO have significantly reduced costs, and for Professional Services Organization, it is a typical component of the most astounding performers.
- With a breakthrough perspective of your whole resource pool, you will diminish the authoritative expenses related to keeping up these outdated frameworks. Also, you can enhance income, enhance the resources to achieve success and sustain customer relationships.
- Streamlined demand planning process will lessen the risk of complex demand planning weekly/monthly batch process times
- Increased quantitative understanding of promotional effectiveness
- Improved efficiency in overall demand planning practices
- Reduced downstream inventory investments (better ROI) with better forecast accuracy.
- By enhancing your resources management procedure, you will have the capacity to distinguish the shortage of skills and preparing prerequisites, reducing any future resourcing clashes and their unfriendly impacts.
- Resource scheduling application provides a birds-eye view of your entire resource pool.
- Timesheets are an important part of resource optimization which enables managers to view the time their employees spend on each task/project.
- Resource planning for creative industries should focus on not only utilizing resources, but also keeping them satisfied.
- Predict Hiring and Resource needs.
- Anticipate and Meet Demands for industry trends.
- MAP attrition rates
- Balancing Staffing for profitability.
- Resource Optimization helps to evaluate how well your entire resource pool is utilized on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- It ensures that the revenue is utilized to maximum effect and balance the workload.
Resource Forecasting Approaches
- Workload Analysis
- Management Judgment
- Technology Trend Analysis
- New technology trends can often blindside project managers and leave them short-staffed for upcoming projects.
- Use Employee Level Forecasting
- Creative work can’t be scaled like factory work, your forecasting must also be at an employee-level.
- Essentially, this means forecasting based on the skills and work habits of individual employees.
- Adopt a participative Approach
- Your resource planning can either be top-down or it can be bottom-up.
- This is where top management and project managers come together to plan future resource requirements
- Management tells project managers the business direction, and project managers develop a solution to meet their requirements.
- Plan for Contingencies
- Have plans for worst-case scenarios – what you would do if a key team member decides to quit or if a resource doesn’t perform as expected.
- Factor in enough of a buffer time to ensure you can deal with issues when they arise.
- Growth of the Organization
- Ask yourself: how fast is the business growing?
- Is the business contracting/expanding in a certain area?
- What is the business’ financial health for supporting personnel changes?
- The ad-hoc Projects Requirements
- This will ensure that you have the right balance of talent on your team to meet project demands.
- Identifying the Ideal Buffer Size
- There will always be a mismatch between what you estimate vs. how long a project actually takes.
- Use historical project records to identify this mismatch and use it when forecasting buffer size for future projects.
- Customer Requirements
- Estimate future client demands based on your current requirements.
- Figure out resource allocation and hiring needs.
Importance of Resource Forecasting
- Conflict resolution – between delivery teams, resourcing and recruitment teams
- Improve project delivery
- Reduce administration costs of resources along with bench resources
- Identifying training requirements
- Reducing Opportunity loss – Ensuring incapability of resources does not result in opportunity loss
- Improve operational efficiency
- Increase the profitability of business
- Eliminate confusion, streamline the resourcing and save precious time for a business
- Ensuring the business is neither overstaffed nor understaffed.
- Resource forecasting stop overworked and underutilization
- Upcoming projects are adequately staffed.
- Account managers will use it to figure out what new business to pursue.
Applications of Resource Optimization
Optimization of Hospital Resource
- Collaborative physician/nurse multidisciplinary care management of medical patients with expedited discharge
- Perioperative anesthetic and pain management strategies for primary total hip (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA)
- The use of specialist nurses across a variety of roles, and team midwives who provide care for pregnant women from the beginning of care to the end of the post-natal period. It also found that there is potential for a reduction in adverse cardiac outcomes in hospitals through
- Prescribing guideline discharge therapies in acute cardiac care.
- Remote management of heart failure patients.
- The establishment of pre-operative assessment and consultation clinics
- Distributed access to scheduling systems
- Preferentially loading appointments onto high-attendance days
- The use of text messaging or automated phone calls to remind patients about appointments
Optimize Financial Resources
- Assess Inefficiencies
- Align system, people and process
- Determine Dependencies
- Resolve Constraints having the greatest impact
- Optimize financial close process administration
Resource optimization in Construction
- Manpower
- Material
- Equipment
- Time
- Design
Resource Optimization in Education
- There is a recognition that the allocation of time, people and money that reflects the priorities, vision, and core values.
- There is a commitment to maximize efficiency and eliminating waste.
- There is an effort to identify and capitalize upon resources in the community.
- There is an attention to seeking technology solution that can improve effectiveness and efficiency
- There is recognition of expertise as the community’s most important resources for improving teaching and learning.
Human Resource Optimization
- Efficient management of workers is a key point to achieve success
- Total connection between performance quality and business earning power
- It is important to competently assign tasks to available staff while minimizing costs and maximizing worker satisfaction
- Optimal planning is one that strives to attain business objectives
- Optimize staff productivity.
Oil & Gas Production Resource Optimization
- Data Acquisition.
- Control Loops to support an efficient production
Obeying Minimal and Maximal Limits on Values Including Pressure
- Obeying minimal and maximal limits on values including pressure, temperature and rates.
- Reservoir planning
- Strategic planning
- Well model updating
- Processing facility model updating.
Optimize Fertilizers Resources
- BI Software utilize data to make educated gausses about how much fertilizer would be effective in future applications.
- Break down the type of fertilizer and its nutrient concentration and its effectiveness on each crop over time
- Using data analysis Test different methods to find the ideal solution for your crop and region
- Finding your optimum Economic Yield.
- Field Site
- Statistical analysis
Network Resource Optimization
- Ability to optimize on a range of parameters (bandwidth, latency, cost, availability, etc.)
- Ability to execute a range of optimization algorithms
- Robust topology and network state, including multi-layer topology (for carrier networks)
- Support for diverse technologies and applications
- Policy enforcement
- Ability operate over multi-vendor infrastructure including non-SDN-enabled hardware
Optimization of Energy Resources in Industry
- Calculate the cost and emissions associated with utilizing a range of resources in satisfying the electricity load of an industrial site
- The load forecast component predicts the short-term future load based on historical data.
- The price component generates an electricity cost for the various energy sources being investigated
- Historical data is used to determine the relationship between wind speed and power output
- Combined heat and power component
- Demand Response Component
- The energy storage system (ESS) is modeled to investigate the potential benefit of its operation with the wind turbine.
Water Resource Optimization
- Reservoir Planning Design and Operation
- River water Pollution Control Using Optimal Operation Policy
- Regional Scale Groundwater Pollution and Utilization Management
- Identification of Unknown Groundwater Pollution Sources
- Hydraulic Management of Salt Water Intrusion in coastal aquifers.
Resource Optimization in Inventory Management
- Develop sophisticated forecast model
- Use management solution with real time data
- Implement third party and automation solution
- Track the whole supply chain
- Build contingencies for pipeline inventory.
- Regularly reevaluate manufacturing and logistics
- Shore up inefficiencies in your warehouse
Resource Optimization in the Road Sector
- Comprehensive Transport
- Road Network Structure
- Project Development and design
- IT and Fee Collection
- Vehicle Standards
- Managing demand
- Innovating Finance
- Education
Resource Optimization in Project Management
- To evaluate how well your entire resource pool is utilized on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- It ensures that the revenue is utilized to maximum effect and balance the workload.
- By enhancing your resources management procedure, you will have the capacity to distinguish the shortage of skills and preparing prerequisites, reducing any future resourcing clashes and their unfriendly impacts.
- Improving project delivery will help diminish expenses and increment edges.
- With a breakthrough perspective of your whole resource pool, you will diminish the authoritative expenses related to keeping up these outdated frameworks. Also, you can enhance income, enhance the resources to achieve success and sustain customer relationships.
How does Resource Forecasting Work
For successful resource forecasting, you need to take the following factors into consideration:
- Growth of an Organization
- Attrition Rates
- Skill
- Project Type
- Project Size
- Technology Trends
- Track demand for your existing skills
- Track future market needs
- Other factors
- Client requirements
- Ad-hoc project requirements
- Ideal buffer size
What is the Best Resource Forecasting Method
Adopt a Participative Approach
- Adopt a participative approach where you bring together top management and project managers in forecasting decisions, focus on employees and plan for contingencies for more accurate resource forecasting.
How do you Calculate Resource Needed for a Project?
- The Judgment of experts
- Alternative analysis
- Published estimation data
- Project management software
- The bottom-up estimate
Formula
Resource utilization = Busy time / Available time
- Schedule of the project = … days
- Cost of the project = … man days
- Standard working day = … hours
- Standard 5 day working week = … hours
- Weekly resource productivity rating 80% = … hours
- Single resource productivity during the schedule = … days
- Cost of the project divided by resource productivity = … human resources
Why Business Fail at Resource Forecasting?
- You won’t understand your customers, making it harder for you to develop products that suit them or predict what they’re likely to buy at any given time
- You could underestimate the amount of stock or resources you need at busy times and fail to meet market demand. This could negatively impact your company reputation and drive your customers elsewhere.
- You could order too much stock. If you’re selling consumables, you may have to throw unsold stock away. Even if your products are evergreen, you’ll have to shell out to store them until you can find buyers.
- You won’t be able to produce accurate financial plans or set realistic key performance indicators (KPIs), so executing your business plan will be more challenging. This could affect your company in a host of ways – it could cause cash flow issues, for example, or affect your ability to obtain funding to expand.
- It is impossible to guess the future.
- Their opinion are often biased.
- They are based on inaccurate research
- Forecast misses are soon forgotten
- Experts forecast one thing and the contrary
- The lack of data trap
- The over simplification trap
- The not based on reality trap
