How to match future demand with capacity in VOGSY

If you cannot match demand with capacity, your sales efforts might be in vain. You may get a signature, but no invoices will get paid without folks who can deliver work.

Revenue projection is pure fantasy without capturing (at least) high-level demand and weighing that against your ability to deliver. Making hiring decisions without insight into skills, capacity, and demand is risky.

Do not fly your business blind. VOGSY offers two options for matching demand and capacity:

1. Opportunity bookings

2. Opportunity projects

Opportunity bookings are very useful for capturing demand in an early stage of an opportunity when the exact amount of needed time or hours is not yet defined. Booking resources is pencilling in a reservation for a certain timeframe so that everybody in the company knows that these resources are "promised for."

Opportunity projects are very useful for capturing demand in the later stages of an opportunity. Setting up the project for this opportunity with the correct work breakdown structure gives the company insight into the exact number of hours needed in a certain timeframe for specific services.

This is also known as the CPQ (Configure Price Quote) activity for creating quotes or SOWs (Statement of Work).

Allocating people to these opportunity projects leads to a number of soft booked hours in the resource planning.

With opportunity bookings, you can capture the demand for certain activities (demand lines) within an opportunity. This allows you to create accurate, granular resource plans and gain insight into employee availability when managing multiple overlapping opportunities.

VOGSY provides two methods for defining this demand: by FTE or by Hours.

1. Planning in FTE

When you specify the demand in FTE (Full Time Equivalent), you define the number of FTEs needed for the activity.

• Allocating Resources: You can select one or more employees or placeholders. VOGSY aligns the allocation with their working hours (e.g., a standard 40-hour week = 1 FTE; a 20-hour week = 0.5 FTE).

• Resource Planning View: In the resource planning timeline, these bookings appear as "currently" booked (without specific hours displayed). These lines are read-only in the planning grid.

2. Planning in Hours

When you specify the demand in Hours, you assign the total number of hours needed for the activity.

• Allocating Resources: You can assign a specific number of allocated hours to each selected employee or placeholder. You can also specify a day pattern for how these hours are distributed.

• Calculations: Saving the bookings generates planned hours for the opportunity, taking into account the allocated hours, the opportunity's period (start/finish date), the day pattern, and future availability. The "number of hours left to allocate" is automatically updated.

• Resource Planning View: In the resource planning timeline, these bookings show the specific planned hours.

  • Editing: If a line has hours, you can click the button at the beginning of the line to edit the day pattern directly.

  • Navigation: You can navigate to the opportunity to change the expected start and finish dates. And change the amount of demanded hours and the allocation of resources.

Keeping track of opportunities where customer demand is still not yet filled is of the utmost importance.

In VOGSY, there is a view available that is specially designed for this purpose. It's the opportunity bookings view that can be started by hitting the button in the grey square:

All not yet filled demands are easily recognizable with this info:

or in hours:

Creating opportunity projects is easy with project templates and pricelists.

A project template is a predefined set of deliverables with activities and budgets.

If you combine these with the correct price list for this customer, the demand you're capturing is spot-on, and the work that needs to be done has the accurate prices.

The only thing left to do is allocate the correct resources to these projects. You can allocate resources with the right cost rate, skills, and availability.

When searching for employees and contractors who could work on opportunity projects, two powerful options are available.

1. Resource planning gives you a full view of every resource's availability in the future and the type of work they are planned to do. That is important information at that moment because you want to assess whether a particular resource can be rescheduled.

2. The same information in a different format is available in the chart "Resource utilization".

In both options, you can search companies and departments for specific activities, seniority levels, skills, and labels.