In the past 2 decades, organizations have grown many folds, mainly due to introduction of lenient and pro-business laws which have opened up the entire world in a single market place. On top of that the technological revolution has realized the concept of virtual office and real time information sharing.
As a result, the entire world has become like a unified market for medium and large size organizations. Now organizations have offices and representatives in multiple countries and projects have become even more complex and demanding in terms of technology and worker skill sets. This new development has its own pros and cons. Benefits include bigger market, more business and higher profits, but at the same time it has its own set of unique challenges.
As the organizations are growing, so are the number of employees and other resources, this comes along with big issues such as efficiently scheduling resources and maximizing utilization, so that profits can be maximized and associated costs can be justified. It’s easier said than done. Out of all the different types of resources, employees are the most challenging to schedule and optimize, mainly because every employee can have multiple attributes (skills, roles, training, certification, experience, preferences etc…) and capturing and maintaining these attributes can be tedious and never-ending job. Not only this, employees are spread across continents, are highly mobile and therefore can be involved in different projects at multiple locations. Therefore visibility of resources and their attributes is a bigger issue than ever.
What should a project resource coordinator do if he / she is not able to find a resource with the required skill sets in his own team or department? The usual solution is to hire or to contract an outside resource, but this at times is not economical, can be time consuming and not practical due to operational reasons and policies. Other possibility is to extend the scope of search within the organization and look for the required resources in other departments, offices and even offices in other countries, this option has benefits of being economical, comparatively faster and motivating for employees. But identifying the right resources on the basis of required skill sets is only possible if organization is using a collaborative resource scheduling and planning tool that captures and maintains comprehensive profiles of all the resources across the organization that can share resource information (skill sets, commitments, availability etc…) in real time so that efficient resource scheduling and utilization can become a reality.
‘eResource Scheduler’ by Enbraun is a good example of collaborative Employee Scheduling Software. It can be configured to schedule custom defined resources e.g. Rooms, equipment etc. Main features include configurable groupings & resource attributes, drag & drop Scheduling, billable & non billable bookings, time-sheet, resource utilization report, resource forecasting report and financial report.
