Quick Guide for Resource Scheduling & Bench Management in OpenAir

Your team is the lifeblood of your professional services organization. So, managing these resources well is key – key to ensuring your teams are getting the hours they deserve, that they are not overworked, and key in keeping your business profitable.

Managing these resources, assigning them to projects and tasks, and gaining visibility into their usage can be challenging. NetSuite’s OpenAir PSA has some powerful features that can help you keep track of your scheduling, better manage your bench, and capitalize on your team’s knowledge and downtime.

Using OpenAir for Scheduling

As most OpenAir users already know, generic resources are essential to successful resource management. Using generic resources with job codes makes them even more powerful and facilitates the alignment of named resources into a booked project.

Combining generic resources with templated project plans can greatly accelerate project setup and streamline the booking process. OpenAir includes out-of-the-box functionality to take a project plan with generics and automatically create a set of bookings, including dates and hours. If you’re using generics with job codes, it’s now simple to align the generics in the bookings with named resources with matching job codes.

Some businesses may need more features or flexibility in converting a project plan to bookings. These customizations are largely driven by the business need, such as how the project is being booked, synchronization rules, and so forth. At Top Step, we’ve helped many customers with these kinds of customizations to align OpenAir with their process, including creating custom scripts and fields.

You may not need customizations once you’ve tried using the relatively new Project Center in OpenAir, which is only available to customers who are using UI4. While still early in its rollout, Project Center melds project plans and bookings and offers booking worksheet functionality. For more information about the Project Center, check out our webinar, Scheduling Techniques & Bench Management in OpenAir.

Resource Assignments and Management in OpenAir

Once the project is booked, getting the right resources assigned is the next hurdle that OpenAir can help with. The platform offers several options for finding and assigning resources to meet the requirements of nearly every business.

For those professional service organizations with multiple resources that are interchangeable, substituting a named resource for a generic can be quickly accomplished with the chart and resource view. These tools allow you to see resource availability quickly for incoming projects.

Organizations with more complex resource management needs can combine searches with profiles to assign team members to your projects. Profiles can give a level of detail and flexibility to resource assignments that would be time-consuming and cumbersome otherwise. Profile attributes can be almost anything, from proficiency with specific technologies and skills to languages spoken, location, or even willingness or ability to travel.

At its simplest level, searching via profiles can be done using a filter. Simply choose the needed profile attributes, and OpenAir will show you the resources that meet that criteria. For instance, you could create a list of resources within the organization that are mid-level Python developers who are bi-lingual in English and Spanish.

A custom search is more detailed. This type of search permits you to search on profile attributes and other key information, like availability.

If you require even more granularity, you can then move on to an advanced resource search. This gives you the option to search by profile attributes, entity tags, and even hourly costs. Better yet, the search can include both required and optional elements.

Bringing this all together is the compare view for resourcing. With the compare view, you can look at multiple resources that meet your search criteria. Have three resources that are available during a specific time frame? The compare view will allow you to see their information, side by side, so that you can make an informed decision on who to assign to the project or task.

Getting the Most Out of Utilization Reports

An important element of resource management is understanding the utilization of your teams. Of course, utilization can mean a lot of things to different companies. What’s more, it can also give you a variety of information that you can act on.

Utilization can tell you a whole range of information:

• Who is available?
• Who is overbooked, and who is under-booked?
• Are there people on the bench?
• How billable is my team?
• What do billable vs. non-billable hours look like today, and what’s booked out?

The KPIs you use to interpret usability are largely up to what you need and vital for your business operations and profitability.

One use for utilization reports that is frequently overlooked is its ability to make bench time more productive. One way these reports can help with that is with cross-training. For instance, a utilization report might show that you have a team member with a high-demand skill benched starting next week. That may be an excellent opportunity to have that resource begin to knowledge share and train others on that same skill set. In the future, when that particular skill is needed for a project, you’ll have a more diverse base of resources to choose from to fill the gap.

Conclusion

Resource management and scheduling are fundamental to the successful use of a PSA, like OpenAir, in your business. Getting the most out of the tools and reports – both out of the box and customized – means understanding what’s possible so that the tool can support your process. You can find more great tips and information in our webinar, Scheduling Techniques & Bench Management in OpenAir.

Do you need help to better utilize OpenAir for your professional services organization? Top Step helps businesses, large and small, every day to get a handle on their resourcing and gain better insight into their business and operations. Helping our customers is our passion – contact us today.