How can AEC firms optimize utilization rates?
Tracking and managing employee utilization is essential for good AEC firm management. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done – tracking every resource effectively and accurately can be difficult.
So, what’s the secret? How do some firms get more out of their employees? Most of the firms that achieve the highest utilization rates have better processes around resource management. These firms can find available resources and apply them to active projects. They can find over allocated employees and shift the workload to others.
But at an AEC firm, resource management can be a difficult discipline to embrace. It’s harder still when you try to implement the process with horrible software. The only way the software will be widely adopted is to make it easy and fast: easy to find who’s available and fast to assign them to projects. This is where Microsoft Project Operations and aec360 comes in.
The screen shot below shows the Resource Scheduling Board. On the left you see a list of employees who fit a particular profile. That may mean they have a particular skill set or they hold a formal certificate or license. You can apply filters to easily see employees that match any resource requirement.
The blue, red, and white bars give us an indication of what these resources are working on and how booked they are. So, there is an easy way to filter employees based on their profile and an easy way to see their availability.
The next question is, how quickly can we assign available resources to open task requirements? The screen above puts the user in a drag-and-drop environment so that’s all they need to do. Drag the open task requirement to the resource and let it go. It’s probably the fastest possible way for you to assign resources.
Project Operations and aec360’s ease of use and quick utilization leads to full adoption of the software.
