Understanding Resource Utilization Interactive Reports

Before you can generate a resource utilization interactive report with meaningful results, resources or their supervisors must:

• Ensure that resources have values for the Department (DEPTID), Job Code (JOBCODE), Location (LOCATION), Standard Hours (STD_HRS) and Standard Work Period (STD_HRS_FREQUENCY) fields in the Job record (JOB).

• Submit forecasts using the Forecast Time - Summary page or the Review Forecasted Time page in the Employee Self-Service folder and Manager Self-Service folder.

• Submit actual hours worked using the PeopleSoft Expenses self-service pages for time reports.

  Note: You must use PeopleSoft Expenses to capture actual time for the Actual to Forecast Utilization interactive report. However, you can capture forecasts for the Forecast Utilization interactive report using PeopleSoft Program Management.

Before you can compare forecast utilization with capacity and actual utilization, administrators must:

• Configure a PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine server.

  See PeopleTools: Analytic Calculation Engine, “Managing Analytic Servers”, Configuring and Starting Analytic Servers.

• Run the utilization and capacity engines for the period of time covering the actual time and forecasted time submissions so that utilized hours and capacity hours are calculated and available for use by PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine.

With the Forecasting feature, you can analyze forecast utilization and actual utilization at a summary business unit or organizational level and drill down to detailed information for individual resources. PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine provides the utilization interactive reports. You do not need a separate database to store data.

PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine reports are dynamic and interactive. You can move data elements on a report and view them using different dimensions. Viewing information from different angles provides in-depth information about the organization, such as how much capacity is available for additional workloads and how well the organization was utilized in the past. You can also evaluate the accuracy of forecasted information by comparing forecasted utilization to actual utilization.

PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine output can be exported to Microsoft Excel or printed. The communication between a PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine interactive report and the database is one-way. The changes that you make on the interactive report do not affect the data in the database.

When you initiate a process request to launch the Forecast Utilization interactive report or the Actual to Forecast Utilization interactive report, the system:

1. Determines the scope of resources.

2. Determines capacity and forecasted utilized project and personal (policy) hours of the resources.

3. For the Actual to Forecast Utilization report, determines actual utilized project and personal hours of the resources, taking into account adjustments to actual time.

4. Obtains descriptions and SetID mappings.

Utilization is defined as the number of utilized hours in a period divided by the number of capacity hours in the same period. Utilized time is the total number of hours during a specified period of time that an employee plans to work (or has worked) on an activity that the organization includes in its utilization analysis. You can configure the type of project time—such as billable, nonbillable, and internal—and the type of personal (policy) time—such as training, vacation, and administration—and include this information in the definition of utilized time. You can also configure the system to use pending forecasts, include external resources, and include specific job codes when performing the calculations.

Control over the definition of utilized hours enables you to adapt to changing business requirements.

The capacity of a resource is defined as the employee's standard work hours minus company holiday hours. The Services Forecasting feature determines capacity at a calendar-week level, where a week is defined as Sunday through Saturday. For example, the calculation for a resource's capacity for a given week is:

Capacity is calculated for resources who are active during the reporting period.

You can use these security layers to restrict the amount of data that each user can analyze:

• Standard row-level security.

  Use row-level security to give users access to a specific list of business units from which to select when performing the analysis. At run time, the system requires users to select at least one human resources (HR) business unit on the Utilization Parameters - Business Units page or the Utilization Parameters - Organization Units page. The Business Unit field is a prompt-with-edit field that has a row-level security view that controls the business units from which the user can select, if row-level security is active.

• Tree security based on business unit security.

  Use tree security for users to analyze departments or locations by selecting from department or location trees that are associated with an HR business unit. On the Utilization Parameters - Organization Units page, users can only select from HR business units that are accessible to them through row-level security. The available department or location trees depend on the business units that a user can access.

See the product documentation for PeopleTools: Security Administration