Resource Scheduling Software – Measure and Utilize Resource Availability at Every Level

What is the most important resource for you when you are managing a project? It’s your people or team, isn’t it? You also require equipment, tools or machinery, finances, and facility to get the job done. But without having a team who has the requisite skills and competency to use that equipment and tools, you cannot deliver your project. Just adding people to your team or doing resource scheduling isn’t enough for the success of the projects. You should be able to utilize them optimally on billable work to gain maximum efficiency. A resource scheduling software helps you do that. It not only ensures the best resource allocation, optimization but also enables you to derive good resource utilization. Before moving on to know how resource scheduling software helps to measure and utilize resource availability at all levels, let’s look at the definition of resource utilization.

What is Resource Utilization?

Project managers use resource utilization to find out their team’s capacity for a period of time. This metric is also used to determine which resources may be under or over-utilized. Knowing the resource utilization provides awareness of how many hours the team is spending on the actual project work vis-à-vis unproductive tasks. To calculate the resource utilization for your team or individual, you need to use the following formula:

Resource utilization = Actual time/allocated work time ÷ Resource capacity

Resource utilization can be measured for one person or entire team in hours, days, or percentage.

Optimal Utilization

So, how can you derive optimal utilization? It is the process where you strive to maximize the utilization of one or more team members to attain the most out of their capacity. To calculate the available capacity, you need to consider their planned leaves, planned training, or other non-project activities.

How can eResource Scheduler Help in Measuring and Utilizing Resource Availability at Every Level?

1. Find Qualified and Skilled Resources for Your Projects

Implementing a resource scheduling software that has configurable forms and user-defined fields and lets you capture all relevant information about your resources is a game-changer. eResource Scheduler is a tool that captures the roles, competencies, qualifications, certificates, preferences, availability, etc., for all your resources. The scheduling chart of this resource scheduling software includes advanced filters with which you can quickly find the most suitable and qualified resources by using any resource information. You can use the filters one by one or in some combination. This makes sure that only those resources which fulfill the requisite criteria will be identified. With this feature, you can actually find the right person for the right job while ensuring your project’s success and the team’s satisfaction.

2. Check Real-Time Resource Availability 

With resource scheduling software such as eResource Scheduler, you can determine the precise resource availability and then effectively schedule them on various projects. The scheduling chart of this resource scheduling tool shows the real-time availability of each resource on a per-day basis and even in an hourly format. Also, whenever any new booking is created in the tool or some existing booking gets updated or deleted, the resource availability gets updated each time automatically. Hence, you can check the updated availability of skilled and qualified resources, and when you find a perfect match, you can schedule them for the right project.

3. Gantt Chart View Enables Easy Resource Scheduling

eResource Scheduler Cloud is a top-rated resource scheduling software that provides a convenient and easy-to-understand Gantt chart view. This view enables you to get an overview of your existing team’s schedules and their availability in a few easy steps. The Gantt chart view also displays the working and non-working days that a team will be following. This data helps you to find and compare the availability of the best and most qualified resources. You can check their availability on the required dates and accordingly schedule them on various projects.

4. Easily Scheduling using Drag n Drop

After finding the best resource and their availability, you need to select the booking dates on the tool’s scheduling chart and schedule that resource on a specific project. With the drag n drop feature of this resource scheduling software, you can easily extend or shorten any booking or transfer a booking to others. In big organizations, there are multiple resources aligned on different projects, which makes it tough to keep track of the capacity of each resource, and you may end up overbooking someone. With eResource Scheduler Cloud, you can easily monitor your team’s capacity, resource utilization, scheduling, etc., on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If your plan overloads any resource when you create a new booking or alter any existing one, the scheduling chart will instantly display it in the overload indicator.

5. Resource Overload Indicator

In an organization with resources working on multiple projects simultaneously, it’s easy to lose track of every single resource’s capacity. This may lead to resources getting under or overbooked. Thus, a resource scheduling software like eResource Scheduler monitors your resource capacity and utilization daily, weekly, and monthly. The functionality called the Resource Overload Indicator flags any such scenario where a resource is overloaded when any new booking is created, old one changed or updated, or any booking is transferred to another resource, etc. The scheduling chart of this award-winning tool immediately highlights the overload indicator and displays the overload in hours.

6. Capture Accurate Information During Resource Scheduling

Capturing all key information accurately while doing resource scheduling is vital. Besides some standard information such as the project name, specific task, date, time, effort, etc., eResource Scheduler Cloud is a resource scheduling software that enables you to add any custom fields you may need in the scheduling window. This allows you to get the exact information that can be utilized to quickly filter any bookings or reports whenever you need.

7. Measure and Optimize with Resource Utilization Report

It is important to keep optimizing your resource utilization. But how can you improve something that cannot be measured accurately? Therefore, the first step is to measure the resource utilization and then report it accurately. eResource Scheduler Cloud uses certain algorithms to measure and report your resource utilization precisely at all levels – be it resource, a particular project, teams, or per office location, etc. What’s more? This data is constantly updated in real-time when any new booking is created or any current one deleted or updated. This tool’s utilization reports have the feature of high configurability (units, views, graphs, filters, etc.). You can get all the key information needed to make any management decisions and optimize your resource utilization.

8. Well-Organized Resource Plans Along with Availability Report

You require accurate information about resource availability to make any decisions related to any new project or hire people for a team. Many organizations still use cumbersome spreadsheets or other traditional methods to capture and report such data. But the availability report of a resource scheduling software like eResource Scheduler shows precise and integrated availability data for any team at all levels of organizations in various units and views. These reports are updated in real-time, facilitating efficient resource scheduling and making hiring plans for the short, mid, or long term.

Use the Top-Rated eResource Scheduler to Measure and Track Your Resource Utilization

Now that you know the importance of tracking resource utilization for any project, advanced resource scheduling tools like the eResource Scheduler can ease your life. It helps you keep track of your resources and the status of projects in real-time. It enables measuring the utilization at all levels of organization, project, team, and individual levels and updates the data automatically in real-time. Need some customization? It’s easy. You can customize your reports in some easy steps to meet your requirements. So, implement eResource Scheduler to streamline your resource scheduling process completely. This tool assures to improve your resource utilization percentage by almost 18 to 30%. So, when are you planning to take a free trial of this tool to make perfect resourcing decisions.