Resource Planner is a fully featured and fully integrated resource planning tool that lets you view and plan your physical resources, assets and licenses over any given time period.  It can be used track items such as equipment, rooms, software licenses and much more.

Resource Planner lets you manage the following events for your resources:

• Bookings
• Activities
• Tasks

Bookings

Bookings are reservations of resources for current or upcoming projects.  They enable you to "pencil in" or schedule resources so that you can make a resource plan for your company for the current period or future period.  Bookings are associated with projects.  Bookings are typically made in the early planning stages of a project and are a step before assigning resources to tasks.

Example: Lighting equipment has been booked for 2 months on an upcoming film project starting in January.  The company does not yet know the exact tasks it will be required for.  They just know they will the equipment for this period. 

Activities

Activities are work events that are not directly involved in projects.  You need to track these non-project activities so you can make sure there are no scheduling conflicts when booking resources onto projects or assigning resources to tasks.

Example: The company's RED EPIC-W 8K camera is dues for a service so will be out of action in July for 3 weeks. 

Example: The company's Conference room is hosting training in October for 4 weeks.

Tasks

A task is a work item in a project with a specific purpose within a defined period of time or by a deadline.  Tasks are related to a larger goal and belong to projects.  Tasks have a name, description, a start date, end date and duration.

Example: You want to build a house.  That's a big, complex project with many work items to complete.  So you would will want to break this project down into smaller work items (or tasks) so that you can manage this complex job.  You may have tasks such as "Make house foundation", "Build house frame", "Lay bricks", "Put on roof", "Install windows", "Add doors", "Install locks", etc. 

Grouping

You can group your resources so that you can easily identify them and see metrics for these groupings.  Group your resources using the following criteria:

• Company
• Location
• Department
• Skill

Example: Turn on Location grouping so all your resources are listed in their locations and you can see the usage metrics for your resources across your various locations.

Usage Metrics - Utilization Load & Number of Units

Resource Planner lets you view different sets of metrics for your companies, departments, locations, projects ans skills.  Metrics include:

• Fixed cost (Gross & Net)
  
• Estimated Cost (Gross & Net)
• Actual Cost (Gross & Net)
• Fixed Duration (Days & Hours)
• Estimated Duration (Days & Hours)
• Actual Duration (Days & Hours)
• Load Utilization (Percentage)
• Load Availability (Percentage)
• Number of Units (Load)
• Number of Units (Availability)

When the number of units being used exceeds a resource's quota, then you are alerted in the usage metrics.

Example: Turn on Usage and Percentage to see the percentage load across your departments and locations. Then, turn on Number Of Units to see the exact number of resources from each department required for the next 6 months.

Filtering & Quick Search

Resource Planner lets you filter the list of resources so you only see the resources that you wish to manage & plan for.  You can filter by booking, project, department, location and more.  

You can also search for resources using text searches to find any resources that match the text.  Text searches will search for matches in many fields - including name, department, location and company.

Example: Add a filter to just view resources from your Production department.  Then do a quick search for "Montreal" to just see the resources from your Montreal office.  

Coloring

Add colors to bookings, activities, tasks and resources to easily identify your projects, departments and more in the Resource Planner. 

Saving & Recalling Views

Create and save your favorite views in the Resource Planner and recall them at anytime.  You can share them with other Projectal users.

Example: Save a user view that lists only the audio visual equipment.  Or, save a user view that lists the department usage requirements for the next 6 months.  Or save a user view that lists the resources at the Vancouver office and group them by department.

Import & Export

You can import bookings, activities and tasks from an external spreadsheet for quick addition into the Resource Planner.

You can export all of the data that you see in Resource Planner to an Excel spreadsheet so that you can use this data in other applications.