Predictive Resource Planning

Predicting resource usage smoothes demand and lowers works costs.

It is most beneficial over the medium and longer term, where historic information and known future trends can be built into the process.

For example, if you know about seasonal reactive maintenance or peak periods, you can:

• Reallocate preventive maintenance activities away from those periods to free up resources for likely reactive maintenance
• Plan for supplementary contract resources or materials to support peak periods.

To be able to predict future workload, we need linkages between all systems. That is:

• Knowing project dependencies allows scheduling of projects and groups of projects
• knowing dependencies of activities within projects and resource requirements for each activity allows scheduling of resources for the project
• Allocation of resources in the inventory system for activities (linked to works projects) allows resource allocation analysis.

There are many ways to achieve predictive resource planning, but generally historical data and/or sensor technology are used. If well-documented works orders are fed back into the system, you can analyze resource requirements for the future. Sensors are used to predict asset failures, so we know about the required resources well in advance of actual failure.

If we can account for works and their resources in detail, we can smooth peak demands.