This article provides an overview of the Planning Reports available on PPO that will help you to understand how your resources are being utilised. The reports are:
- Capacity vs Planned report;
- Daily Planning Detail report;
- Monthly Planning Detail report;
- Planned Resource Costing report;
- Planned vs Actual report;
- Planning Heat Map report;
- Project-centric Planning report;
- Resource-centric Planning report.
Capacity vs Planned
This report is used to understand what your capacity utilisation is for a specified period from an individual resource perspective. You can group the report by department, job title or any other resource attribute.
The report shows the total capacity hours and planned hours for each resource. It then also shows whether each resource is over or under allocated both in hours as well as a percentage. Over allocations are highlighted in red to easily identify problems.
The last two columns split out any over or under allocation as separate values. These are useful to identify when a resource may be over-allocated for some sub-set of the period selected but under allocated for the rest.
If you want to understand why somebody is over allocated or just want to see what they have been planned on, you can simply click on any resource which will drill through to the Resource-centric Planning report for that individual.
Daily Planning Detail
This report provides the lowest level of detail available from PPO. It shows per day, per resource the number of hours that a resource is planned on a particular piece of work on a specific project. Depending on how your instance has been configured, this could be a task or a a high level resource allocation item. The report also includes the resources charge-out rate to allow the cost to be calculated.
This report is most useful when extracted in Data Sheet (Excel) format which then allows you to pivot and analyse the data.
Monthly Planning Detail
The report provides a summarised view showing the planned hours per resource per project. It is pivoted by month to allow you to get a longer term view and understanding of where resources are going to be utilised.
Typically you would run the report either for a specific project or for a specific resource to either get an understanding of what a resource is planned on or what resources have been planned on a particular project.
From this report, you can also drill down to the Planning Detail Report by clicking on either a resource, a project or the planned hours for a specific month.
Planned Resource Costing
This report is used to get an understanding of the total planned hours and cost over a specified time frame. The report is very flexible in that it allows you to filter for any subset of resources or projects and also allows you to group and summarise by resource or project fields. The rate that is shown will be the average rate for the selected summary level and the selected period.
You can drill through on any row to the Planning Detail report by clicking on the summary field e.g. in the case shown by clicking on the resource name.
Planned vs Actual
If you are using the time entry functionality in PPO, you can use this report to get an understanding of the accuracy of your planning by comparing the time that resources have been allocated to work (planned) versus the actual time that they recorded on their time sheets.
The report is very flexible in that it allows you to filter for any subset of resources or projects and also allows you to group and summarise by any resource or project fields. You can obtain additional detail for any row by clicking on the summary field which will either show the information at the resource or project level, depending on your selected summary fields and group by values.
Planning Heat Map
This report provides a graphical representation of the extent to which resources are over or under allocated. You can therefore see at a glance which resources have spare capacity or where you may run into problems.
The shading on each "cell" indicates the percentage of capacity that the resource is planned for each period. The darker the shade the higher this percentage. Over-planned resources will show up as a dark blue. You can drill through on each row to get an understanding of why a resource is over or under allocated.
Project-centric Planning
The report shows the planned hours per resource, grouped either by project or a project attribute such as programme or project type.
You can drill through on each row to see which projects that is included on your group field the resource is working on.
Resource-centric Planning
This report shows planned hours per project, grouped by resource (or a resource attribute e.g. job title or department). The planned hours is pivoted by month for the selected period. The report also shows the capacity and also the hours under/over capacity. This allows you to easily see which departments or roles are currently over/under utilised.
You can drill down on any row to see the specific resources for a particular project.
For more information about Resource Planning in PPO, read the following knowledge base article.