How to Successfully Implement Capacity Planning in Your Agency
We show you how and with which tools capacity planning succeeds in agencies
- What is capacity planning?
- Benefits of Capacity Planning for Your Team
- How do you implement capacity planning in agencies?
- Best Practice: From cost estimate to project completion with the agency software The Agency Management
- Conclusion: Break free from island solutions with the All-in-One solution for agencies
It's not so easy to accurately determine and plan the available capacities in an agency - at least not without the right tool. In this article you will learn how an agency software, e.g awork can help you optimize resource allocation & Co. Of course, you'll also get our OMR tool recommendation which even includes AI-supported features. Let's go!
What is capacity planning?
Capacity planning is the allocation of resources based on capacity needs. This includes available time, the budget, the employees, the machines and the premises.
Capacity Planning vs Task Planning
Source: Timewax
| Kapazitätsplanung | Aufgabenplanung | |
| Beschreibung | Planung eines (z. B. wöchentlichen) Zeitkontingents pro Projekt für Mitarbeiter*innen anhand des Kapazitätsbedarfs (wie sie dieses nutzen, entscheiden Mitarbeiter*innen selbst) |
Planung der Mitarbeiterauslastung durch Strukturierung und Zuweisung von detaillierten Arbeitsschritten anhand eines geschätzten zeitlichen Aufwands (Zuweisung und Priorisierung von Aufgaben erfolgt durch Vorgesetzte) |
| Vorteil | geringer Aufwand, aktuell und realistisch | Mitarbeiter*innen müssen nicht selbständig Aufgaben planen können |
| Nachteil | Mitarbeiter*innen müssen selbständig Aufgaben planen können |
zeitintensiv, teilweise veraltet und realitätsfern |
Benefits of Capacity Planning for Your Team
With a capacity plan, you can effectively organize and manage the workload within your team. Here's how you can benefit:
- Resource Utilization: Use your resources optimally, avoid bottlenecks and meet your deadlines on time.
- Allocation: Distribute the work evenly, avoid overloading and increase team satisfaction.
- Efficiency: Employees prioritize themselves, respond more quickly to problems and achieve more.
- Transparency: Workloads and availabilities are transparent. Each team member has an overview and can align his/her planning and coordination accordingly.
- Adaptability: Respond early and flexibly to changes such as new requirements or projects, shifted priorities and bottlenecks.
How do you implement capacity planning in agencies?
On OMR Reviews you can find different agency softwares, such as awork, including The Agency Management. It is mainly used in small and medium-sized agencies - but also in some consulting firms and advertising film productions.
Why is The Agency Management so popular in modern teams? This is due, in part, to the following characteristics:
- Junior and lateral entrants suitable: For modern teams, not only the CV counts. Even lateral entrants and newcomers will quickly get the hang of it with the clear platform and intuitive user interface.
- Mobile suitable: The cloud solution runs on any browser. This makes working together in the office, home office and in complete remote teams easier.
- AI-supported: The invoice receipt recognition of the software is AI-supported, which means no more manual typing.
- KPI Range: You can create the usual reports with the Agency Management and also generate and export completely individual reports with almost 100 KPIs.
- Integrations: Thanks to the Low Code adapter platform Make.com, you can access more than 1,000 third-party apps in addition to the standard integrations.
- Permission Management: You decide how much The Agency Management should reveal. Simply set the appropriate permissions for your team members.
- GDPR: The software complies with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, concludes AV contracts with your customers and service providers and takes care of all IT security measures.
With the Agency Management, agencies can switch from a complex IT infrastructure to a single tool - this reduces errors as well as manual tasks, saves money and lots of nerves. You have everything in view, from the open cost estimates, the adherence to your project budget, the recorded working hours, the onward billing of your supplier expenses, open invoices and the cost development within your agency.
Best Practice: From cost estimate to project completion with the agency software The Agency Management
Are you using a huge pool of IT systems? Maybe an accounting software, a CRM, a project management and a tracking system - or even Excel? Quite complex and error-prone. We'll show you how to manage every process in your agency with just one tool.
Capacity Planning
In the Agency Management you carry out your capacity planning by directly determining in the respective project how many hours a certain employee may dedicate to this project in the corresponding week. This allows you to see at any time,
- whether the required hours fit into the budget.
- which employees have the corresponding capacities.
- whether employees are possibly under- or overburdened.
- what the project status looks like.
Video: Resource Planning on Project
Setting up a project
With the Agency Management you can do every step you need for project management and evaluation. In addition to customers and projects, you can also set up budgets in the software. This can be helpful when you are billing different hourly rates (e.g. a reduced hourly rate for large projects and the usual hourly rate for small projects running in parallel) with customers.
Simple and efficient creation of your cost estimates
When creating your cost estimates, you can take over templates and position blocks from old estimates with a few clicks. If your estimate matches an old document, you can easily and quickly copy an old estimate and adjust it. By default, the tool applies the customer-specific hourly rates stored. You can change these manually if necessary. In the background, The Agency Management automatically calculates your available hours. Once the estimate has been released, you can bill it as a partial service, with a reference to the estimate as a down payment invoice or in your final invoice.
With the release of a cost estimate, your capacity planning initially looks like this:
Source: The Agency Management
You can see which hours have already been incurred. This value is the sum of previously recorded working hours. You also gain insights into the ratio of the hours incurred to the time budget from the cost estimate. Then, when you add an employee to this planning, it looks like this:
Source: The Agency Management
Employees can have their planned weekly hours displayed in the Agency Management. The colour scheme and the actual and optimal hours immediately indicate whether they may be under- or overconfident:
Source: The Agency Management
If you now want to take hours off overburdened employees, you can see at a glance in the team overview which employees are underburdened during the same period and act accordingly:
Source: The Agency Management
Now all team members are (again) well or even optimally utilized. You only see green and yellow markings. Below this, the tool reveals two particularly interesting insights:
- the degree of completion of your project: current status, planned times and your remaining budget
- the week planning related to individual employees
Source: The Agency Management
Internal performance recording (client and project related time recording)
Assign the appropriate times to your projects. This applies to both the working hours of your employees and those of your freelancers. Depending on the meaningfulness, employees can record their times via the timer function (mouse click for start and end), the calendar view (recording of all times at the end of the week or the month at one go), in the time recording list (list view) or project-wide and EuGH-compliant.
Task Management
You can manage, schedule, assign and comment tasks. From the task structure or the overview of the substeps, you can generate timing and status lists with a few clicks.
Source: The Agency Management
External service management (recording supplier receipts)
When you commission, for example, copywriters, proofreaders or photo and videographers, you receive incoming invoices. In the Agency Management, the now necessary external service management can also be depicted. In the respective project you can see which external services have already been billed. These can be linked to a cost estimate. The software automatically notes the completed billing (incl. time and invoice number) in the project.
Source: The Agency Management
The receipt recognition is AI-supported. For you, this means: never type receipts again or manually process invoice mails. The tool recognizes all significant data in JPEG and PDF files. Your accounting only needs to give its approval.
Absence Management
The absence management of the agency software provides transparency within the team if necessary, automated approval processes (e.g. applications for holidays and further training), helps in finding replacements and calculates the remaining holiday entitlement.
Source: The Agency Management
Project and Company Controlling
Source: The Agency Management
The tool analyzes the most important KPIs such as annual revenue, estimating volumes, budgets, fixed costs, revenue and expenses. In the annual overview, the key figures are summarized across all clients and grouped by the last 12 months. In addition to the standard evaluations, you can (access-controlled) generate individual reports with about 70 KPIs. These can relate to projects, budgets or clients.
Video: Evaluation Capacity Planning
Function Overview
The Agency Management is an All-in-One Solution, allowing even small and medium agencies to implement capacity and resource planning. These are the features of the agency software in detail:
- Offer and Invoicing: Cost estimates, outgoing invoices, open items, credits, cancellations, reminders and liquidity planning
- Cost Transparency: Time recording, external service management, project management and evaluation, company evaluation and user-defined reports
- Process Digitalization: AI-supported receipt recognition, task management, retainers, fee budgets, reminders and contact management
- Automation and Integration: Document dispatch by email, invoice subscriptions, Integromat interface, reminders, reminders, Get My Invoice, business paper and CI
Conclusion: Break free from island solutions with the All-in-One solution for agencies
If your agency still loses too much time through manual work and continues to make annoying (transmission) errors, it's high time to switch to a comprehensive agency software like The Agency Management. As you can see, it supports you from creating your cost estimate to successful project completion - even with AI support! Take the opportunity: Here's the free demo.
Pia war mehr als 10 Jahre im Vertrieb und Marketing verschiedenster Unternehmen aktiv. Danach gründete sie ihr eigenes Unternehmen und betreibt dieses zusammen mit ihrer Geschäftspartnerin.
