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 Based on booking intervals option for the
selected capacity area under the Quota management section on the page.
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 page for the selected capacity area or through the API.
To use planned
capacity for booking activities:
Here's what to do
-
Select the Enter quota as a percentage of calendar capacity and configure
working time plans and enter the number of days in the Next Days 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 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 work
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 application are: [8-12], [13-17].
In this case, the total amount of planned working time is 80 work 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).