How many people do you need to keep your business processes running smoothly, and what roles are required? Capacity planning means looking ahead at anticipated demand and assessing whether you have the right people available at the right time. Efficiency expert Jeroen Douma answers the most frequently asked questions.
Why is capacity planning important?
'By planning ahead, you avoid both over- and under-capacity. You map out anticipated growth, so you know in good time whether you have the right people in place and sufficient hours available. This allows you to act promptly and avoid the consequences of being over- or understaffed.'
What happens when capacity is not properly managed?
'Under-capacity increases pressure on your team, which can come at the expense of employee satisfaction. Background processes are less visible and therefore often the first to grind to a halt, risking longer waiting times, disruptions to stock and the flow of goods, reduced quality, lower customer satisfaction, and potentially even reputational damage.
Over-capacity brings different risks: unnecessary staffing costs weigh on profitability and the long-term financial health of your business. Good capacity planning enables you to course-correct in time, avoid both scenarios, and find the optimal balance. That may sound like an unattainable ideal, but it is well within reach.'
How do you determine the capacity you need?
'The foundation lies in an activity-based hours standardisation model: workload based on activities, taking into account company policy, location characteristics and output. By linking activities to a qualification level, you gain insight into how the workload is distributed across qualifications. You can also factor in staffing assumptions and pay components to map out your optimal team composition, both in hours and in costs.
Map this out across a full (financial) year and you can set it against the capacity you currently have in place, accounting for absence (annual leave) and expiring contracts. This tells you whether your current team is ready for everything the year ahead may bring, and what action you may need to take.'
How does your software support strategic capacity planning?
'With our software Workload Planner and Workforce Planner, we help our clients model and analyse capacity. Our clients use this for:
- Determining the optimal team composition
You work systematically towards an optimal team composition, now and in the future. At a glance, you can see which people and qualifications you currently have in place and what is still missing. This allows you to determine precisely whether action is needed and what steps that requires.'
- Managing seasonal influences proactively (the degree of flexibility)
For organisations that face significant seasonal fluctuations, it is beneficial to map out early whether sufficient flexibility is in place to absorb peaks and dips effectively.
- A structured rationale for process optimisation
The software allows you to explore various scenarios and assess the impact of, for example, automating or digitalising tasks and processes, or making choices to centralise operations (rather than keeping them local). This way, you combine experience and intuition with concrete data and insights for better-informed decisions.'
- Retail concept development
Developments in the retail concept or components thereof continually require insight into the impact on workload and complexity (both of which directly affect labour costs). The affordability of the retail concept is therefore an ongoing search for the right business model: how do you maintain the balance between service, offerings and the associated costs? Independent insight into workload, optimal team composition and labour costs helps to make better-informed decisions about the parameters of the retail concept.'
In brief
A future-proof team is not built overnight. That is why we help you work in a structured way towards:
- Defining the ideal staffing structure
- Analysing the ideal staffing structure against your current contracts
- Analysing the affordability of your retail concept
- Implementing and configuring the software
- Supporting process optimisation
- Realising strategic capacity planning
Interested in what our software and experts can do for you? Feel free to get in touch — we would be happy to show you how we work.
