Detailed Planning Workspace

Use this workspace to plan the use of your company's employees, either as independent plans or as a refinement of existing job budgets' long-term plans.

Maconomy automatically remembers your selection criteria when you open this workspace again. In addition, if you select the Remember all settings in det. plan. windows system parameter, Maconomy remembers all of the settings in this workspace and the Detailed Employee Planning workspace, including starting date, ranges, and so on.

If you create a job budget for a job in the Job Cost module, this workspace enables you to do more detailed planning to define exactly who should perform which tasks, for how long, and on which dates.

Use the Detailed Planning tab to enter a planning start date and specify whether you want planning to be done on a weekly or daily basis. You can also define the period of the time horizon for which you want to plan by entering the number of units (days/weeks). For example, if you select that four units should be displayed, you can make plans for four weeks in the Planning Lines sub-tab. You can also indicate whether or not lines should be shown in the sub-tab. For performance reasons, it might be advantageous not to have lines shown before you want to work in the sub-tab.

The Planning Lines sub-tab consists of a grid structure with slots; each planning slot specifies a period of either a week or a day, depending on your selection in the Detailed Planning tab. For example, if you select "Week" in the tab, each planning slot unit in the sub-tab corresponds to a week. If you enter the starting date as May 1, 2015, you can then enter hours for the week numbers 18, 19, 20, and 21 in the four slots.

You can create a detailed plan as an independent plan by manually entering the job number, task number, and activity number on a planning line. If you do this and then select the Automatically assign planning lines to budgets system parameter, Maconomy tries to link the manually entered line to an existing line in the latest approved revision of the planning budget. To do this, use the same method that is described in the Job Progress workspace in the Job Cost module. The number of the matching job budget line is shown in the sub-tab. If Maconomy fails to find a matching job budget line, or if the matching job budget line has already been assigned to a planning line, Maconomy interprets the manually entered line as an additional task that is not mentioned in the planning budget.

You can also choose to create a detailed plan based on job budget lines. Then when you use the Create Plan from Job Budgets action Maconomy suggests what should be included in the detailed planning. The suggestion is based on the latest approved revision of all planning budgets that describe tasks that are to be performed within a range of dates that overlap the time range that the workspace displays.

If you create planning lines using this action, Maconomy transfers information from the relevant job budget lines and displays them on the planning lines that you created. The transferred information covers data on the job in question, the employees assigned to the job, and the planned number of hours. After you do this transfer, you can only change this information on the job budget line in question, but Maconomy transfers potential changes to the assigned planning lines in this workspace.

After you create detailed planning lines from job budgets, you can allocate the transferred number of hours to the specified employee on the new planning lines. If you created the planning lines from job budget lines that specify an employee category instead of a specific employee, you can allocate the number of hours that you transferred to planning lines to one or more employees who belong to the category in question. This enables you to plan for several employees to work on the same task created based on a job budget line. You can thus choose to create a long-term plan by using a job budget, which you can later refine by allocating the planned number of hours to the employees in question, when you have decided exactly who should perform the task.

Another way to transfer planning lines to this workspace is to have Maconomy automatically allocate hours on planning lines in the Job Planning workspace in the Job Cost module. You cannot move or delete automatically allocated lines. For more information, see the description of the Job Planning workspace.

If you plan more hours on a task in this workspace than are specified on the job budget line on which the planning is based, you can set Maconomy up to issue a message. You can also let Maconomy solve the situation by removing the overtime hours from one of those employees who has been allocated hours on the task by selecting a method in the Resolve Exceeding Task Allocation field.

When you maintain information in the planning process, you can use the Distribute Quantity action to enter the number of hours that an employee is supposed to work on a planning line. Depending on the distribution method that you select in the Distribution island, Maconomy then distributes the hours for the employee in question on the line of the job, activity, and task from the specified starting date and ahead in time. Maconomy makes this distribution based on the principle of avoiding overtime, if possible. If this is not possible, Maconomy tries to distribute the hours of overtime on normal working days, if you specified in the System Information workspace that overtime is allowed. If this is not sufficient, Maconomy distributes potential overtime on days that are not typically working days, such as Saturdays and Sundays. However, for each date, you can never allocate more hours to an employee than the employee's maximum number of working hours according to the employee revision that applies on the date in question. For more information about employee revisions, see "Date-Dependent Employee Revisions" in the introduction to the Employees workspace.

During the planning process, you can always see the planned number of hours for each employee and whether one or more employees have been allocated too many or too few hours (compared to the hours during which the employees in question are available in the period) in the Employee Availability island. When you create or change a detailed plan, this island displays information about the employees' work load. This enables you to always see if you have allocated to one or more employees too many or too few hours within the specified time frame. You can set Maconomy up to give a warning if you have allocated too many hours to an employee in a given week, compared to the employee's planning time. See "Central Concepts of Resource Planning" for more information on planning time.

Maconomy also issues a warning if you allocate hours in a planning slot to an employee who is not available during the period for which you are planning. This ensures that you cannot plan hours for an employee without being aware that the employee in question will be absent during the planned period. Maconomy transfers information about employees' absence periods from effective lines in the Employee Absence Calendars workspace. For more information about effective absence calendar lines, see "Calendar Lines Entering into Effect."

When you allocate hours to an employee on a planning line, you can select a booking type of each allocation: Confirmed, Requested, or Preliminary. By specifying a booking type, you can indicate whether the planned hours should be considered tentative or permanent. It may, for example, be uncertain whether a given project will be realized or how much time is needed for its completion; but on the other hand, you may want to signal that certain resources may be required for a certain period in the detailed planning. By creating allocations of the booking type Preliminary, you can reserve the resources that are required for such a project on a preliminary basis.

Maconomy considers allocations of the booking type Confirmed to be permanent, whereas less restricted allocations should be of the type Preliminary. Allocations of the type Requested are allocations that Maconomy either could not convert from Preliminary to Confirmed, or allocations that are to be reviewed by some other person before they are converted to Confirmed.

You can convert allocations of any booking type into another booking type if this does not create a conflict with other allocations. This means that you cannot convert a preliminary allocation, for example, to a confirmed allocation if the converted allocation together with any other confirmed allocations to the same employee would cause the planning time of that employee to be exceeded. For each task you can create three versions of allocations: one for each booking type. You can select or change the booking type in the detailed planning in this workspace or at the planning budget level in the Job Planning workspace in the Job Cost module. You can do this for either each planning line, or for a selection of planning lines by means of the actions Convert to Preliminary, Convert to Requested, or Convert to Confirmed.

Similarly, in the job planning you can do the conversion for one budget line or for all of the budget lines of the planning budget. To obtain an overview of any conflicting or potentially conflicting allocations, you can print a conflict report in the Reporting menu in this module.

Note that if you do not want to use the functionality of booking types, the Use Confirmed Bookings Only system parameter allows you to omit the use of the three booking types; all allocations are then automatically of the type Confirmed.

If you need to modify a large number of resource plan allocations, you do not need to enter the changes manually. Instead, you can delete a large number of detailed planning allocations or redistribute the allocations to another employee using the Delete Allocations and Replace Employee actions. You can specify a selection of planning lines to be deleted/reallocated using the selection criteria in this workspace and by entering the date range for which you want to delete the selected lines in the Delete Allocation island. You can also choose to delete/transfer all of the allocations on planning lines that have a specific employee by entering an employee number in this island.

Note that you can select individual lines as "locked." Maconomy then shows a warning if you try to delete or move locked allocations, which are typically used for fixtures such as customer meetings, which you cannot move without affecting a third party.

You cannot perform allocations for planning lines that are derived from budget lines that have been put on hold in the Job Planning workspace in the Job Cost module.

If you specify skill requirements, either in the Skill Requirements workspace or in the Job Planning workspace in the Job Cost module, the detailed planning reflects this. When you allocate hours to an employee on a task in the Detailed Planning workspace, Maconomy checks whether the employee in question has the skills that are required for the task that you specified on the current job budget line. Similar functionality applies in the Job Cost module, so that when you approve a job's planning budget, Maconomy checks each new or modified skill requirement against the employees who you allocated to perform the tasks specified on the lines.

When planning with consideration to skill requirements, you can use the Task Staffing workspace to look up employees who have skills that match the requirements of the tasks that you are planning. When performing searches, Maconomy takes into account the skills, skill levels, and employee category specified on the planning budget line, as well as the available time and potential overtime for each employee. You can select employees who are included in the search as required, and then you can transfer them to the detailed resource plan by means of the Transfer to Plan action.

As part of the planning process, time sheet users or project managers can enter an estimated time-to-completion when revising a planning budget in the Job Cost module. When you approve the revised planning budget, any estimates for a task are displayed in the detailed planning, and you then know whether you should add any resources to or remove them from each task in the detailed planning. For each estimate specified for a task, you must also enter a date. This date stamping is used in the detailed planning to inform Maconomy as of which date the estimate should be implemented in the detailed plan.

In addition, you can choose to have Maconomy automatically create time sheet lines based on the detailed planning. You do this by specifying values in the Pre-fill Time Sheet Lines job parameter attribute. In this job parameter, you can define whether time Maconomy should create time sheet lines automatically, and to which extent the planning performed in this workspace should be transferred to time sheet lines when you create time sheets. When you create a time sheet for a day or a week in the Time Sheets or Daily Time Sheets workspaces, Maconomy determines whether the detailed planning contains any allocations of the booking type Confirmed for the employee for the day/week in question. If this is the case, Maconomy creates a number of time sheet lines that correspond to the detailed planning lines for this day/week. This means that for all of the planning lines that specify that the employee in question will be working on a specific task, the system creates a corresponding time sheet line.

You can print a detailed plan for each employee or for each job, on a weekly or daily basis. The printout shows the employee load, the number of hours allocated to each job, and to which employees, and so on. The printout also shows the number of hours still to be planned for each task, compared to the number of hours specified on the assigned job budget lines.