Unlike many industries, projects in the aerospace sector have exorbitant budgets and costs. Besides that, project management in the aerospace industry entails dealing with large-scale and complex projects for which all the parties involved should be in complete sync and perfect coordination. In addition to that, there are some other challenges such as resource gaps and conflicts, dynamic requirements, uncertainty, and allocation-related issues, that also add to the woes.
So, how can you deal with all these issues and complexity and ensure delivering top-quality projects? Implementing the right resource management tool is the solution. Resource management software can help in doing capacity planning in the aerospace industry. It can also help to closely monitor all resources, and project components, foster collaboration, and smooth communication between stakeholders, and manage capacity optimization.
Defining Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is the process to forecast or calculate the production capacity that is needed to manage the changing demands of a business. This includes matching the data on the availability of your team members and other resources to the ongoing and pipeline projects or task requirements. The process of capacity planning takes into account multiple aspects.
For example, a project manager needs to consider the schedule of the team members or how many hours are they working in a week or month. To plan capacity, you also need to take into account the competencies that your team possesses to work on a particular task or project, and if there are any additional tasks they have been given.
Resource Management Tool and the Aerospace Industry
Though since the pandemic began, all industries and sectors have been struggling, but the aerospace industry has particularly been facing various challenges, such as budget cuts, working in distributed teams, the complexity of projects, etc. This makes it even tougher to execute complex projects without a suitable resource and project management solution.
To be able to improve performance, compete, and thrive, aerospace companies must go for a project and resource management tool that caters to their unique requirements and aid the execution and delivery of large-scale projects in this sector.
The tools for this aerospace industry need to be designed while keeping the security and compliance and accuracy requirements into consideration. This is because the aerospace industry faces some of the most critical compliance requirements and even a small mistake in this sector can lead to fatal consequences.
How a Resource Management Tool Helps with Capacity Planning in the Aerospace Projects
Efficiently managing multiple projects
Juggling multiple projects at one time isn’t an easy feat. And imagine if all these projects are equally complex and challenging. Prioritizing the tasks as per the criticality and schedule is very important for successful project management. While managing multiple projects, you are bound to face resource conflicts, task dependencies, and resource allocation challenges.
The only way to manage all of this seamlessly is to implement the right Legal Management Software that has prioritization capabilities. Such a tool helps to identify any resource constraints or gaps, and task dependencies to determine what needs to be completed first.
As a project manager, it’s difficult to utilize the most critical and skilled resources in the best possible manner. But finding who is working on what realistically becomes tough. However, a resource management tool helps to set the right priorities for all your projects and tasks, which further improves your team’s productivity.
Consider the skills and competencies of your team
It’s a known fact that different people are skilled at different tasks. Therefore, as a project manager, it’s important to identify the skills that all your team members possess and also list down the competencies you are looking for in each role. If you have this in place, you can easily find the most suitable resource when a project requirement comes.
You will be able to assign the right people to the right job or projects. Besides competencies, you should also be aware of what are the interest areas of your team members. If you know this, then you can help them chart out their career path accordingly and align them on projects that they will be interested in doing. The advanced filters of a resource management tool makes it very easy to find the right person according to their experience, expertise, profile, designation, skill set, etc.
Insight into each employee’s capacity and availability
Project and resource managers should also be aware of each employee’s capacity and availability so that they can do efficient planning. If you are working in a large multinational organization with distributed teams. How will it be possible to find the availability of people across locations?
Also, it becomes very tough to find who is working on which project and what’s the capacity of an individual or a team. Having said that, all this information is very necessary for resource allocation. A project or resource management tool acts as a single online platform that all employees across the globe can access. A leading tool such as eResource Scheduler provides availability reports, and data on individual and team-level capacity, which comes in handy in making accurate plans.
Forecast any resource bottlenecks
The right resource management tool can also forecast if there are any probable resourcing challenges, gaps, or bottlenecks. Once, you know what challenges are possible, then you can find suitable solutions for them. Such a tool also tells you who is available, what is the capacity of your team in real-time, and also suggests best-suited candidates for certain tasks.
This makes your resource allocation decisions much easier. A cloud-based and AI-enabled tool also offers predictive analytics and can analyze the current workload or distribution of tasks in a team. eResource Scheduler is one such award-winning tool that has an in-built resource overload alert or notification feature. If your team members are overloaded, the tool will flag it and you can do some reallocation to distribute work in a balanced and fair manner.
Maximize utilization
How can you execute a project if you don’t have the right resources for it? At times, you may have the right people for a task, but you may not be able to maximize their performance. In practical scenarios, many times, some employees are overloaded, and some others may be underbooked. So, how can you ensure that maximize resource utilization while planning for your projects in the most efficient way?
A resource management tool helps you to maximize the utilization of your team, which means, that you can attain ideal capacity management and capacity optimization. In simpler words, you can succeed in getting more done from the resources you have in your team without over-loading them with work.
Access to real-time information and data
Imagine if you find out about a team members’ leave plans last minute. And what is that person is a critical resource for that project. Your schedule and project will be derailed; isn’t it? Such a situation can throw your plans out of gear.
Therefore, it is important to have all data about your resources, people’s availability, project status, and utilization in real-time. This can really help you in capacity planning in the aerospace industry and resource capacity optimization.
Helps in time-tracking and time management
Your team members will always be more productive if they can plan better and if they are aware of the project requirements well in time. Capacity planning in aerospace sector helps to gauge the tasks at hand and how is your team’s time and effort planned.
This helps them to easily prioritize the tasks at hand and not waste any time or effort. Capacity planning also enables a business to maintain the production cycle efficiently so that any losses during high demands can be averted. In case of seasonal demand too, capacity optimization helps to plan your projects, resources, and schedules efficiently so as to meet the expected demand.
Resource Capacity Optimization with eResource Scheduler
As capacity optimization and capacity planning in aerospace sector are vital to execute your projects, implementing a cloud-based, multi-user tool such as eResource Scheduler will streamline your business.
This software is especially designed for successfully executing multiple projects, set effective priorities, do accurate resource allocation, and then track their utilization in real-time. That’s not all. You will have all your key data about your projects, resources, and all important information on a single, online platform.
Using Enbraun’s eResource Scheduler enables you to calculate an individual’s or your team’s capacity, productivity, capacity, availability, etc. automatically. So, if you have some questions about how this tool can be beneficial, take a free trial of this top-rated tool today.