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 for each opportunity.

You can define the number of FTEs required per activity, as well as the seniority and skills needed.

To see how you are going to meet the demand, resources can be booked for these activities. Per resource, you can set which part of an FTE is available.

Also, placeholders can be allocated, for instance, if you are hiring new staff who can be booked on this opportunity.

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:

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.