Tips for Demand Planning in OpenAir

Demand planning is a critical practice in Professional Services operations. It involves forecasting or predicting future human, capital, infrastructure, and other resources for customizing the output. For example, demand planning looks at the available hours to deliver the solution for your customer.

One of the rich capabilities within NetSuite OpenAir is demand planning. Through intuitive dashboards, you can access real-time information and insights into your resource management cycle. These dashboards are centralized, unified, and simple to use, allowing you to view all of your resources so you can make informed decisions on various issues—for example, planning for future projects, staffing, meeting deadlines, and more.

This article will cover how to forecast resources to drive demand and demand reporting options in OpenAir.

What’s Demand?

Demand, sometimes referred to as demand management, is a planning methodology associated with the requests, ideas, resources, and other aspects of project management to deliver. In other words, it’s the practice of determining whether there are enough resources—hours, staff, materials, etc.—to achieve the goals of a project.

Demand planning is closely related to capacity planning in that they’re both resource management processes. While capacity planning focuses on the demand for resources necessary for a future project, demand planning concentrates on the general resource availability for committed upcoming or current projects.

In OpenAir, demand planning requires looking at two things—backlog and pipeline. The two must be married to come up with the demand to be able to deliver. Reviewing these things provide a sense of what services we have sold that we are yet to deliver to customers and what we expect to sell.

Pipeline

Pipeline, as mentioned above, is concerned with determining the services we’re expected to sell. There are a variety of ways to forecast pipeline, with the three common approaches in OpenAir being:

• FTE (full-time equivalent headcount): FTE looks into staffing needs from a headcount perspective to deliver the services expected to sell.
• Hours (estimated resource hours for delivery): What’s the duration in terms of hours by different resources needed to deliver a forthcoming project?
• Money (value of the deal): What are the dollars we expect to deliver in the future, along with our backlog?

A combination of the above approaches can be instrumental in answering all demand needs questions and telling a story around your project’s demand issues.

FTE

Full-time equivalent emphasizes individual work schedules. For example, you must plan your FTE accordingly if you have a demand for 100% of someone’s schedule in terms of eight hours a day, five days a week.

OpenAir features standard FTE reporting values for scheduling, comprising Assigned FTE and Booked FTE as primary options. Your choice will depend on how you plan for your future resources and their demands.

Generics

Generics focuses on looking into the future and scheduling a project based on resource requirements. They are critical points in determining demand when planning for future needs. Generics are more or less like users but come with tremendous benefits, including the following:

• Follow work schedules, meaning you can assign a generic eight-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week work schedule as you would any user.
• Named after a role or skill, for example, a developer, project manager, consultant, etc.
• Support entity tags and custom fields on user records in the sense that any custom field you put on a user record is supported
• Can have skill profile
• Do not require a license, meaning you have unlimited freedom to get creative.

Generics can also be assigned to job codes, which link a user and the generic. In so doing, you can predict future demands based on FTE forecasts. It can play a huge role in determining whether you have enough or excess staff.

Hours

Hours-based demand planning is the same as FTE, except you use scheduled hours instead of work schedules. It allows you to look forward to the number of hours you need by different types of resources and focus on demand by hours. So, depending on the basis you are looking forward to or demand, you can use assigned hours, booked hours, hours with actuals, or hours with actuals.

Money

Demand by money is also common and can be based on either resource scheduling leveraging billing rules (charge projections) or straight-line forecasting. However, commonly used projection reporting values include:

• Projected billing (rules)
• Projected revenues (rules)
• Projected costs (primary cost) (rules)
• Projected revenue margin (rules)

Money is a reliable approach to demand planning. OpenAir often generates a dashboard that showcases expected revenue targets per resource drive staffing needs. In other words, you get an elaborate graphical representation of future demands in dollars against the capacity of being able to deliver. Marrying the two and seeing how they compare is crucial in addressing issues such as whether to bring additional resources when and where or whether to reshuffle demand to deliver.

Charge Projections

Charge projections are available under the project settings and are run globally. OpenAir lets you determine the basis of running charge projections from a list of several options: booked, assigned, approved, worked, approved and booked, approved and assigned, worked and booked, and worked and assigned hours.

Straight-Line Billing Projections

A straight-line billing projection method is a simple and easy-to-follow forecasting approach in OpenAir. It is based on the assumption that your budget is evenly distributed across months of a project’s life cycle.

Once you setup straight-line billing projection in OpenAir, you can tweak it and enable projections per project stage by navigating:

• Administration > application settings > project settings > project stages
• Select a stage
• Check the box and save

Take Advantage of Demand Planning Today

The concept of demand planning plays a huge role in the success of a project or even an organization as a whole. Managers who apply this discipline can eliminate cost overruns, improve operational execution, drive efficiency, and better plan for on-time delivery to meet objectives. The tips and tricks above can help you meet all your demand planning needs in OpenAir.

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