Every Business Has Unique Resource Needs
Getting resource management right is key to the success of any project. There is no one size fits all solution.
Every area of business is becoming increasingly targeted and bespoke. Marketing experts drill their market segmentation analysis deeper than ever before, and “mass personalisation” has become one of the biggest buzzwords.
Clearly, there is plenty to be said for a personalised, bespoke approach. It provides the perfect fit for what the customer is seeking and reduces the need to compromise. By the same logic, taking a bespoke option when it comes to internal processes and tools has to make similar sense. A business’s choice of resource manager tools is a perfect example.
A little background
Every business uses resources to deliver its products and services to customers. Sometimes they are tangible – a supermarket needs products on the shelves or it will rapidly go out of business. In other cases, they are skill or knowledge based – a financial advisor, a chef or an engineer are examples.
In most cases, businesses need a combination of tangible resources and manpower with the necessary skills and experience. We can see this even in the above examples – the supermarket needs produce on the shelves, but also needs staff to put it there, operate the checkouts, provide security and so on. The chef, meanwhile, needs ingredients and cooking equipment.
Commonalities with resource management
Conceptually, resource management is the same for anyone. Any of the above examples need to ensure they have the supply chain in place to deliver the materials they need, and people with the requisite skills to deliver.
They also need to be able to predict what is needed, where and when. And this is where the concept of bespoke resource management really comes to the fore.
Why bespoke is so important
Let’s look at two of those examples again. For the supermarket, the most important factor for its continued success is to ensure the shelves remain stocked while keeping wastage to a minimum. This will use large-scale modelling techniques to understand customer flow and demand.
There will also be a strong emphasis on having reliable suppliers with spare capacity to deliver in volume and at short notice. At the same time, the supermarket will be focussed on flexible staffing solutions. Most of the work requires little in the way of skill and training, so the important thing here is to have people available to call upon as and when needed to deal with peaks and troughs in demand.
Now let’s look at that engineer – or perhaps a company that deals with multiple engineers on large scale infrastructure projects. Here, each step in the project demands specific materials and engineering capabilities. Many of these are specialised, and the engineers will be working across multiple projects.
For the engineering firm, it is not so much about product flow, but instead the focus is on smart use of limited and valuable resources. Allocating those skills in the right places at the right time to ensure everyone is kept busy, but not overly so, is what it is all about.
These are just two examples, but you can look at any type of operation and perform the same analysis. In short, every business has its own unique resource needs and challenges. A bespoke resource management system is the only surefire way to meet them head on.