We’ve all heard the saying, “Prior planning prevents poor performance.” However, there is “planning” and then there’s Planning. The latter entails careful consideration of the resources needed to complete a project and ensuring that they’re exactly where they need to be — in the exact quantities required — to deliver the desired result.
With that in mind, here’s how to elevate your resource planning to increase productivity, enhance morale, eliminate delays, ensure quality, keep costs minimal and benefit from every opportunity.
Identify Your Needs At The Onset
Rather than getting halfway in only to discover a key element is missing, spend some time at the very beginning figuring out exactly what you’ll need. Break the project down into its constituent elements and determine the roles and tasks required to complete each element.
Next, figure out what will be needed to fulfill those roles and carry out those tasks. In other words, get a firm handle on the resources you’ll require. One of the best ways to do this is with a good enterprise resource planning platform (ERP).
Primary Capabilities of ERP
Successful deployment of a solid ERP platform will:
- Enhance the utilization of your resources by guiding you through the prioritization of key tasks and matching them to the resource capacity you have on hand. Carefully managing your capacity against the demand placed upon it will help you streamline processes to the greatest benefit.
- Determine the exact resources needed to ensure your ability to achieve your specific aims. This enables you to employ your resources in the most effective way possible.
- Establish milestones so that you have a firm baseline against which to measure your rate of progress. This gives you the ability to see how your plan measures up to reality, which in turn helps you see where you need to introduce greater efficiencies.
Key Benefits of ERP Platforms
Residing within those capabilities are the potential to achieve clarity in terms of the project’s objectives and your ability to deliver on them. You’ll be better positioned to prioritize tasks, manage stakeholder demands and draw a straight line between strategy and execution.
You’ll also have the ability to define the resources you’ll need early on, which will give you ample opportunity to locate them and put them into place at the moment they’re needed. This helps you find the right people and materiel for the right positions and tasks, as well as help you figure out exactly when they’ll be needed to reduce idle time and waste.
Moreover, you’ll have the ready ability to identify potential issues before they occur, giving you ample opportunity to mitigate them. You’ll also ensure more and better communication between all the people involved.
Managing Your ERP Platform
As you can see, automating your planning processes delivers a number of useful advantages. However, you’re going to need some help to get an enterprise resource platform up and running to its full capacity.
Application management services (AMS) like those provided by Mercer can get you up to speed with fewer hurdles to clear. Maintaining the platform, executing fixes and implementing updates can be accomplished with considerable time and money savings by outsourcing those activities. This frees your IT team to focus on the day-to-day issues, while your AMS contractor focuses specifically upon your ERP platform.
Because that group is dedicated expressly to that platform, they’ll be better positioned to keep up with updates, keep you apprised of relevant new features as they’re developed and ultimately reduce the costs associated with elevating your resource planning.
