What is important, what should be paid attention to, and how can you achieve a tight schedule? Considering these questions ensures that your employees always have enough workload, are not overburdened, and no tasks are overlooked.

To work effectively and efficiently with the Resource Planner module, it's important to be familiar with several terms used in the module:

Skills refer to the types of hours that an employee primarily works on. This is a suggestion and does not enforce anything. Skills are based on the types of hours you have set up in the settings. Assigning skills to an employee is done in the HRM module > respective employee > Employee tab.

A placeholder in the Resource Planner is different from placeholders used in sales quotes. Placeholders in Resource Planner are tasks scheduled for a specific future period but not yet assigned to an employee. You create a placeholder task by filling it out similarly to a regular task and leaving only the employee field blank.

Example: In week 14, approximately 40 hours of production need to be carried out for project X. Currently, it's unclear what specifically needs to be done or who will do it. However, the time must be reserved nonetheless; this is where you use a placeholder.

Assignments are tasks allocated to an employee. These are the 'blocks' in Capacity Planning.

The 'Planning' tab on a project is a tab that only appears when you have the the capacity planning enabled in your environment. In this tab, you can create tasks and get an overview of the current status of a project.

The scheduled tasks are displayed in the time registration module under 'Register' for logging hours. It's the list to the right of the calendar, where assigned tasks are shown on a weekly basis.

In the timesheet view, assignments are shown as a separate section of rows:

As mentioned earlier, an additional dimension has been added under projects. To plan effectively, it's crucial to set the frameworks correctly within projects. You can learn how to do this here.

Creating services remains unchanged. Now, however, you also indicate on the service whether it should be scheduled or not. You do this when creating or editing a service. It's possible to make a service schedulable by default. You can do this via Settings > Projects > Services > The respective service.

Within the projects, there is now a new tab called 'Planning'. When you add services to the project under the Services tab, they will appear in the Planning tab.

The services are listed on the left in order of start date. For each service, you will see a bar indicating how many hours of the budget have been scheduled (scheduled vs. budget). Additionally, for each type of hour for this service, you can see how many hours are over- or under-scheduled, if applicable.

In Dutch: a video on planning assignments

At this point, you have created services and indicated that you want to schedule them. You can do this in Simplicate in two ways:

1. Via the Planning tab

When you select a service and type of hours on the left, the tasks associated with the service are displayed on the right.

Next, you can add assignments for each type of hours. For each assignment, you can specify how many hours need to be scheduled and who will perform it. If you don't know that yet, you can leave a placeholder. Save the assignment. The minimum time unit for scheduling is fifteen minutes. You can set the time unit for scheduling via the settings under the new category capacity planning. You can choose the unit of fifteen minutes, half an hour, or an hour.

It is possible to add multiple entries. All these entries can be assigned to different employees with different numbers of hours.

Note: It is not mandatory to add assignments via this tab; this can also be done in the Capacity Planning.

The bars in the overview of the types of hours and assignments/placeholders indicate how many hours have been spent compared to what has been scheduled (scheduled vs. spent). In this overview, you manage the assignments associated with the types of hours and their budgets.

2. Scheduling in the Resource Planner

It is not necessary to create the assignments first; you can go directly to Capacity Planning. This is a separate module where you can also create assignments directly in the schedule.

Creating and scheduling assignments is done via the 'Projects' tab in Resource Planner Here, you see all ongoing projects, and the services that can be scheduled are displayed (these are yellow bars). Services with a Fixed Price and Post-Calculation can be easily moved by dragging or clicking on the service and adjusting the start and end dates. It's important to note that this also adjusts the duration of the time registration as indicated in the project module.

The order in which projects are displayed in this overview is as follows:

Projects are grouped by CRM relationship in alphabetical order. It is currently not possible to manually adjust this order.

When you expand a project, you see an overview of the employees assigned to a task. You can still assign placeholders to an employee. Click on "Assign" to allocate the task to an employee.

Additionally, under this tab, you can also adjust the period of a task. In the search bar at the top, you can search by employees, projects, companies, or skills.

In addition to creating assignments via the 'Planning' tab in projects, you can also work from the Resource Planner. All services marked with 'Plan Service = Yes' appear in the sidebar labeled 'Projects to plan'. You can find this sidebar under both the Employees tab and the Projects tab.

Here you can see all projects where hours are expected to be scheduled. In this menu, you can easily navigate to the services within the project and their corresponding types of hours. At the level of the types of hours, you can create, schedule, and assign tasks to employees.

Here, under the category 'Backend Development,' you can see various tasks. One task is already scheduled for Leon and Sander, and one task is still open for scheduling. By clicking 'Schedule,' you can immediately allocate the task to a specific time and assign it to an employee, in this case, Jordi.

When you click 'Go to Service,' Simplicate displays the corresponding service in the project overview. From there, you can easily schedule any remaining tasks.

Clicking 'Plan' or clicking on an empty week in the project overview both lead to the following pop-up, where you can schedule the task for the employee:

Additionally, you can click in the Employee overview, to get a slightly different view:

If a user has the "Edit planning items in Past" permission enabled, they can edit tasks that are in the past. This can be done in both the project overview and the employee overview. You can find this permission under Settings > Account > Users, User Groups and Permissions > Capacity Planning > Edit planning items in past.

When you open the Resource Planner, it defaults to the employee overview. Under each employee's name, you'll find their teams and skills as assigned in HRM. Click on these to filter accordingly. You can also use the search bar to filter. Capacity Planning displays a weekly or monthly overview; toggle between these views to the right of the search bar. The vertical red line indicates the current week/month.

Next to each employee, you'll see their current planning in percentages for the week/month. 100% indicates full capacity, while 40% indicates 60% availability. Capacity is calculated as follows:

To quickly view the number of hours instead of percentages, you can use the Ctrl + i shortcut (Cmd + i on Mac). Alternatively, you can click to expand a specific employee. In doing so, you will see the total hours worked by that employee. Clicking on the total hours of an employee will show you the calculation of their capacity.

In the Capacity Planning module, various colors are used to provide a quick overview of employee capacity.

To adjust the percentage thresholds that trigger color changes, navigate to your Simplicate environment: Settings > Capacity Planning > General Capacity Planning Settings.

The colors are based on these environment settings. For more details, refer to the article below.

When you expand the employee, you can see what is planned per project for that employee. On a day-by-day view, the planning takes into account the roster, and you will not see tasks on a roster-free day.

For each task, you'll also see a dark and light colored section on the bar with a smaller progress bar at the bottom of the task. The progress of the bar and the color of the task are determined by the hours allocated to the task in relation to the remaining available roster hours. In the example above, 1 hour is planned for the task, and there are still 4 hours available in the employee's roster. This results in a ratio of 1/4, and the bar is filled accordingly to 1/4 of its capacity.

Below the employees, there is an overview of placeholders. These are tasks that you have created in the projects tab of the planning where no employee has been assigned yet.

In the time tracking module, under the 'Register' tab, you can see the tasks scheduled for the respective employee. Here, you can also view the planned hours and the hours already spent on these tasks. This is separate from the hours recorded under the same time category that are written outside of the task.

The option 'Assignments' has been added to time tracking. By selecting a assignment, Simplicate identifies the corresponding Project-Service-Hour Type combination. After logging hours against the assignment, you can see the expenditure compared to the assignment's budget.

An hour registration written on an assignment can be recognized by this logo on the registration:

When logging time on assignments in the timesheet, a separate row for Assignments will appear.

When using the Resource Planning module, you can also utilize task statuses to track the progress of tasks. Learn more about this in our article on assignment statuses.

Within the Capacity Planning module, various KPIs are shown. Below you'll find the breakdown for each KPI:

Budget

Spent

Planned

Remaining

Per user, you can set whether they have rights to view the entire planning or only what is relevant to them. You do this via Settings > Account > Users, User Groups, and Rights > Rights per User Group. Under the 'Capacity Planning' section, you will find two rights: 'Access' (pertaining to access to their own planning) and 'Access to Full Planning'.