• PM can plan personnel and do labor estimates-to-complete in one transaction instead of creating and maintaining spreadsheets for each instance of a job.
• Line Managers and Division Managers can view/manage labor coverage conditions in their organizations and in other line organizations across the company, as well as manage open requisitions for personnel.
• Human Resources staff will have complete scheduling visibility of all open requisitions to see clearly when new human resources are needed.

Does your firm need the Proforma Labor Planning™ tool from ASC? Try this 20-question test.

True or False

• In your company, like most Federal professional services firms, each employee has a line manager (LM)/organization and may be assigned to one or more billable activities.
• Popular employees are often double or triple booked by job/project managers (PMs) and you have very limited visibility over the contention for these people, while less popular employees always seem to be uncovered and you never know when or why
• Your PMs complain constantly that their assigned project personnel are not sufficiently accountable to them, and/or that many are not qualified or motivated enough
• Your PMs sometimes withhold coverage by understating the labor revenue available on their jobs and projects
• The employees in your organization are forever questioning you about their current and projected coverage.
• Infrequent events like vacations and training are never planned well and, as a result, projects are often caught short-staffed at inopportune times.
• You have work that you'd like to get accomplished with the people on overhead, but you have no means of forecasting who will be on overhead when, and no convenient means to manage them even if you did.
• Even though planned raises may be known to your LMs well in advance, they cannot be accurately reflected in the project's profit/loss (P/L) forecasts for fear that they would be communicated to the wrong people prematurely.
• Although 99% of your project P/L is related to labor, you have no decision support system to verify each project's labor P/L that also uses the same numbers in your labor coverage plans (i.e., when project-by-project P/L assessments are done, no one attempts to look at the resulting impact overall on people coverage, and vice versa).
• Your projects have a mixture of labor types -- employees, subcontractors and consultants -- and cost-incurred visibility over the latter two types of labor typically lags for months after the work is performed.
• You have limited forward visibility of your labor application rates (% direct/total) by line and geographical location.
• You have no accurate idea what your period-to-period revenue projection would be based on your labor plans and you have no easy or accurate means of checking the labor dollar base projections for your indirect rate pools (even though executive management frequently asks you for this assessment).
• Recruiting may be the weakest link in your labor-planning chain. You often have open requisitions for people while employees who theoretically have similar skills are sitting on overhead.
• Your Human Resources people have no clear insight into which new personnel should start when.
• It seems like you're always laying off people in one sector or geographical location while you're trying to hire similar skills in another. Your employees, LMs and PMs have limited visibility into the opportunities for using excess labor in one sector/location to fill needs in another.
• Apart from the above issues related to business in-house; you have even less labor planning visibility on unbooked business. For example, you have no convenient means to do a rough-order-of-magnitude (ROM) labor dollar estimate for a new business opportunity.
• When you win new jobs, it takes months to sort out the human resource needs and backfill impacts on existing projects.
• You have endless nagging questions about the impact of future business on your line and Human Resources activities.
• Based on your best factored assessment of projected wins on proposals, you can't tell how many of what types of people Human Resources should be looking to recruit or when they might be required.
• Your Human Resources people always seem to know how much new employees should be offered, but you have no accurate way to know how much you can afford to offer on each open requisition and still make your numbers.

If you answered "True " to most or all of these questions, then you can identify with the cartoon below. You've probably said many times -- "&%$#@* -- why isn't there a single tool to help me manage these things??!!" The truth is that there are no comprehensive COTS software applications to address these issues because the application challenges the computing envelope of an RDBMS. Although the application has been attempted many times over the years, a scalable version has proven to be too much for RDBMS technology.

Now, thanks to the Relavance™ associative computing architecture, there is just such an application. The Proforma Labor Planning™ tool or PLP is designed for use by line and project management personnel as a decision support tool.  ASC is currently evaluating companies as beta sites for PLP.

To learn more about the PLP application and the power of associative solutions on the Relavance architecture, please contact us today.