12 ways to improve profitability with resource management

To successfully navigate choppy economic waters, companies must leverage their most vital resource - human capital - and direct resources towards the highest priorities. For professional services firms, where margins are often thin and your people are your product, resource-planning could not be more essential.

Poor resource management can have serious repercussions, from decreased productivity and quality to increased costs, lost opportunities, and dejected team members. Neglecting the proper allocation of resources is not an option.

In this article, we’ll explore how the effective and efficient use of resources can improve profitability and share effective resource management strategies that you can start today.

Importance of resource management for businesses

Here are just a few of the ways that implementing a resource management process can help your business:

Effective resource utilization

Going beyond just avoiding depletion - it's about utilizing every opportunity to squeeze out additional value from what you've already invested.

To manage capacity and demand

A resource planner is a central framework that allows teams to make full use of their resources. As opposed to tackling everything that comes up all at once, effective resource managers can skillfully organise and prioritise projects according to current data points – ensuring personnel are allocated in the right places.

Time and progress tracking

Comparing your resource plan against the data of how long it actually took from timesheets can give insight into your utilisation rate and help refine future expectations.

Reduces risk

When businesses don't take care in divvying up resources, they can quickly find themselves in a precarious financial situation. Learn more about risk management here.

Maximizes profit

Despite stellar sales and competitive prices, there's still potential for high overhead costs to eat away at your profits - all due to sloppy resource management. By having full visibility over your resources, you can prevent overspend and maximise profits.

Ways to be more effective with resource management to improve business profitability

As a business, you need to strike the balance between maximising revenue and considering the well-being of your people. These tips will help you not only increase your profit margin, but also better manage your team, for their benefit and yours.

Prioritise projects

By prioritising your projects, you can avoid overcommitting resources and burning out your employees.

Set utilization targets

There’s nothing quite like having a target to hold teams to account. By setting clear utilization targets you can ensure your project managers have utilization expectations as well as boundaries to protect your team from overwork and burn out.

A comprehensive resource management solution will have easy to use reports that show individual and company-wide utilization levels so you can understand who to assign to a project at a glance.

Automate wherever possible

Automation is a great way to reduce your employee's workload, so it’s worth investing in updated resource management tools tailored to meet your objectives and track project growth. 

These powerful software solutions give you real-time information on projects and resource availability while preventing errors - saving time so teams have what they need right away without worrying about any delays. 

That is only one type of process that can be automated. There are countless more, and the search is best led to business leaders of the specific divisions.

Delegate work efficiently

Work delegation should be reassessed to ensure each project's requirements can still be met should fewer resources be available. 

Project managers need to remain aware of staff workload and availability in order for everyone to collaborate effectively towards a successful outcome - it all comes down to good delegation and excellent communication.

Make processes transparent

Establishing a workplace culture of transparency starts by gathering all your project and field data into one place. Granting access to that information in custom permission groups allows everyone on the team to stay up-to-date with high-priority tasks while keeping an eye out for potential risks along the way. 

With a solid resource management system, you can make sure no information falls through the cracks - setting your team and your organisation up for success.

Forecast future requirements

Having a plan for upcoming projects is key to smooth resource planning and successful recruitment. With an accurate prediction of the necessary skills your business will need in the future, you can give yourself ample time to find suitable staff as well as assign resources without overburdening any one area. 

Depending on the length of your sales cycle and the length of your projects, how far out you can see resourcing requirements may vary from a few days to a few years. If you are only able to see a few days or weeks out, you will need to remain agile, as well as predict hiring needs on trends.

Use resource management software

Streamline your planning with workforce management software. Not only will it make tedious manual data entry and spreadsheet maintenance a thing of the past, it will also allow you to make insight-driven decisions based on how much capacity your team has coming up.

Using resource management software, project managers can quickly find the right team members to allocate to any task, utilising filters such as experience level and regional office.

In summary

The efficient use of resources in management involves much more than trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of your team - it requires thoughtful planning. With the right tools, you can ensure you have accurate utilisation targets and evenly distribute your work by availability, preventing overallocation or worse, employee burnout. 

Projectworks business management software offers you a complete overview of your professional services firm. With features to deep-dive into forecasting, project margins, utilisation and more Projectworks ensures you have the right information to make decisions that will affect the profitability of your business. Managing your resources, scheduling and invoicing all in one central platform, it’s the professional services automation every firm needs.