You can book activities using planned capacity either from
Day 1 of the calendar or use the planned or available capacity based
booking approach for booking on a short term.
Before you start
Ensure that you select the Booking Interval based option
under the Manage quota as section to use planned capacity for
booking.
Recommendations:
If your calendars are accurate only for few days, use available
capacity for this period and then switch to planned capacity.
For planned capacity, use quota per capacity category to imitate
distribution of your work force work skills.
For planned capacity, close unneeded booking intervals in advance
to imitate distribution of your work force schedules. If possible,
maintain the total length of open booking intervals close to work
day length to avoid unnecessary over or under booking.
Note: Quota based on working time plans is only supported,
if quota is managed based on booking intervals and is not supported
for time slot based quota. Planned capacity is an equivalent of the
"working time plans", which you can set on the Available Capacity
screen or through the API. Also, working time plans are accessible
through the Admin interface.
To use planned capacity for
booking activities:
Here's what to do
- Select the Enter quota as a percent of planned capacity
option for daily quota configuration.
- Select the Enter quota as % of capacity available by
calendar and enter the number of days in the next days and
switch to the plans field to use the available capacity for a
specified number of days and switch to planned capacity after the
specified days.
For example, if you enter 0 in the
next days and switch
to the plans field, then it means that you want to use the available
capacity to book activities. If you enter 1, it means that during
the first day (that is, today), the available capacity is used and
the planned capacity is used from tomorrow. The logic is to use the
planned capacity from the day after the specified number of days until
the overnight time setting value is met. If the number of available
resources is different from the working time plan resources, then
the available capacity is used for booking and may lead to over or
under booking of activities.
Note: If no working time plans are
set, then the available capacity is used as planned capacity. Working
time plans can be set in absolute time units (minutes/hours/days)
or in number of resources. If resources are used for plans, the value,
‘Number of hours per man-day’ is used to convert the number of resources
into hours (and then to minutes, if required).
- Click Save.
The available capacity is distributed between capacity categories
and booking intervals according to real schedules; whereas, the planned
capacity is proportionally distributed between available booking intervals
and copied for all the capacity categories. For tomorrow, assume
that there are plans for 10 resources. The following list of categories
are available: Install, Uninstall, Trouble Calls. The booking intervals
defined in the system are: [8-12], [13-17]. In this case, the total
amount of planned working time is 80 man-hours (that is, 10 resources
* 8 hours working day). The planned working time distributes as follows:
| Capacity Category |
8 - 12 |
13 - 17 |
| Install |
40 |
40 |
| Uninstall |
40 |
40 |
| Trouble Call |
40 |
40 |
Note that the total working time plans are distributed
proportionally on all intervals for which the booking is not closed
on the interval level in advance. If the intervals [0-8] and [17-24]
are included, then the planned working time distributes as follows:
| Capacity Category |
-8 |
8 - 12 |
13 - 17 |
17 - |
| Install |
28 |
14 |
14 |
24 |
| Uninstall |
28 |
14 |
14 |
24 |
| Trouble Call |
28 |
14 |
14 |
24 |
Therefore, around two-third of the overall time is
reserved for the morning and evening intervals even though there are
probably no resources working (assuming that the overnight setting
in the business rules page is set to 0). If the overnight settings
are set to non-zero value, the -8 interval has a length of 8 hours
(that is, starting at beginning of day), but the 17- interval prolongs
till overnight end, so the length of the interval is increased with
the overnight settings value.
To overcome the issue from last
example, you can use the following strategies:
Delete the non-working intervals from the overall intervals
list, if the companies/buckets have stable work hours.
Close booking on the non-working intervals in advance (over
the period defined for quota calculation in the business rules).