Laptop mit Vanillaplan vor einem Betonfundament

This is why long-term planning is the foundation for every successful company

Elena Höppner
by Elena Höppner Content MarketingPublished on 26.03.2024

The construction industry in Germany started 2024 with similarly gloomy forecasts as in the previous year. Early capacity planning can be a decisive advantage for companies in the construction industry: Even in times of a fluctuating order situation, it is possible to proactively influence capacity utilisation.

A persistent lack of orders, a continuing slump in sales and a staffing situation between a shortage of skilled labour and short-time working - the forecasts for the construction industry in Germany in 2024 hardly look any better than in the previous year. In times like these, it is more important than ever to utilise all available potential in order to master the current situation and create a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

The decisive advantage: security through long-term planning

Few employees, little time, little money? Then planning must be all the more effective. And effective here primarily means forward-looking in order to be able to actively influence capacity utilisation, especially in volatile times.

Operational capacity utilisation under control in the long term

All project expenses and personnel resources under control and an overview of your overall capacity utilisation - with Vanillaplan capacity planning, you can keep your operational capacity utilisation in balance in the long term.

Up to 60 weeks in advance, you can see your personnel expenditure for all ongoing projects in a centralised view. If projects are due to be postponed, you can see the effects on weekly capacity utilisation directly and can adjust your personnel situation in good time. This allows you to maximise the efficient use of your resources.

In order to know how you are on track in terms of resources in addition to the mere project costs, you can see the resource consumption - the ratio of calculated effort and planned resources - under each project. As an intuitive red-green diagram, this shows you the extent to which you are exceeding or falling short of your planned expenditure due to your previous resource planning.

So that you also know what your total utilisation looks like in each week, there is a red-green diagram at the bottom of the view. This shows you the extent to which your weekly utilisation of all projects exceeds or falls short of your predefined target utilisation. This means you already know today whether you will be over- or under-utilised in eight weeks' time and can adjust your projects in good time.

You can use the filter functions to filter by individual departments, e.g. office, production or assembly, so that you only see the individual workload for these departments - both as individual project expenses and for the overall workload.

Thanks to the reliable overview of project expenses, resource consumption and overall capacity utilisation, you always know where you stand and can make any necessary adjustments at an early stage. This gives you reliable control over your capacity utilisation even in volatile times and allows you to operate as efficiently as possible with the resources available.

"We invested in Vanillaplan to maintain security." Jakob Strähl - Ernst Fink AG.