Resource Management
For any service-based organization, getting a grasp on your resources and their utilization is key to scaling up and increasing revenue. However, for many organizations, this feels like trying to see in very muddy water. When your main resource is the people you staff, how can you fully and accurately understand the utilization of that resource and how can you pull the levers that increase revenue without overburdening your most valuable and necessary asset – your team? In order to understand how to tackle the problem of resource management especially as it applies to the resource of staff, we have to look carefully at a few important things.
Big Picture to Granular
Effective resource management happens in stages. When the initial request comes in from project managers, the need for a resource is assessed based on the scope of the project, skills, attributes, etc. Once the proper resource has been allocated to the project, that’s when things get more granular. It’s not as simple as assigning the needed resource to the project and calling that resource case closed. Once the resource has been assigned to a project, further utilization data can be garnered from individual tasks and time assigned to them within the project at large. This will allow all team members to have a solid picture of what resources are being utilized where, and how often. This level of data is extremely useful when it comes to scaling your resources and your resource management strategies.
Scalable Resource Management
Having the data at your fingertips that can showcase patterns in which resources are used most often and how those resources are being allocated can help tremendously in deciding what resources need greater investment, which perhaps could be leveraged more than they currently are, and which need to be re-thought or eliminated. The efficiency of a scalable resource management solution offers your organization is invaluable. Once in place, a properly architected and set up solution can apply to all of your resources no matter how quickly you scale.
Resource Utilization and Profit
We all know that the amount of time our team is billable impacts our profit. It’s a pretty apparent pattern. And yet, that doesn’t stop the issue from feeling impossible to overcome when you’re dealing with scattered data and clumsy forecasting. How do you increase utilization across your resource pool when you don’t have a tangible grasp on what that utilization looks like currently. Word of mouth from your staff isn’t the most reliable metric as it can vary vastly from day-to-day. You need clearly laid out data that shows bench time so you can minimize that number and maximize your team’s effective output.
It may seem a little trivial, to get it exactly right, but when it comes to your business’ bottom line, there’s no such thing as trivial. It’s been proven that even a small bump in the percentage of resource utilization can have a ripple effect that lifts your company’s revenue considerably. That’s exactly the reason accurate and easy resource management is so critical to growing enterprises.
See it All
Gone are the days of weekly whiteboarding and spreadsheets trying to account for all resource utilization within your organization. Those methods are, unfortunately, far less effective. What you really need, in order to confidently manage resources even as you scale, is a tool that will allow for accurate and adaptable forecasting.
The resource management capabilities in NetSuite’s PSA solutions provide real-time visibility across the resource pool with the ability to assign based on skills and availability. It’s specifically built for smooth hand-offs between departments so no beats are missed and no billable hours are wasted. We offer the kind of insights that allow for accurate forecasting as well as an easy path to increased utilization, which leads to increased profits and, often, a more engaged workforce.
If your organization struggles to meet the supply vs. demand and assigning resources to one-time and recurring deliverables feels like wading through quick-dry cement, NetSuite can make it so much easier. Want to know what it would look like when applied to your specific organization’s needs? Give us a call today.