How do you manage and forecast resources in you integration business?
“One of the biggest problems we see is that integrators aren’t laying out their projects profitably right from the beginning,” says Brad Dempsey, CEO of Solutions360.
One of the first things you need to do before you’re worried about who’s doing what, is establish the timeline of the project.
“When do I need the different kinds of labor at a much higher level? Not necessarily down to the week, but understand how many of those hours you’re going to need in what months. If you don’t start with that, then you’re never going to get any further in your forecasting.”
Q360 help integrators with forecasting
Summer comes every year, yet a lot of integrators get caught unprepared. “If integrators want to avoid surprises, it’s is all in the planning. So how do integrators start to overlay sales forecasts with the book? To me, that’s a big paradigm shift that we see all the time,” Dempsey continues.
“This is one of the powers of forecasting a lot of people don’t realize,” Dempsey reports. “When we talk about sales forecasts, a lot of us just think, well I want to drive my sales team to sell as much stuff as possible. But that forecast exists for a lot of other reasons. One of the most important reasons of course, is that if I build my sales forecast correctly, I can overlay that with my backlog.”
Once I overlay my sales forecast from my backlog, I can make decisions about hiring and decisions about when I’m going to need what discipline of labor.
Watch the video below for the full discussion:
Brad Dempsey and Brad Malone discuss, Forecasting for Successful Project Management
Handpicked Related Content: Solutions360 Integration with D-Tools Adds Resource Planning and Financial Management with a Focus on Project Profitability for System Integrator Customers
a
