Between increased competition and digital transformation, companies are facing more and more profitability issues. This is particularly the case when companies are of a certain size, with a large number of employees or when they have to manage huge sales areas. What better way to manage your teams than with a planning software! A necessity in fact to manage the daily activity of its collaborators and an efficient tool to find the way back to profitability. How to choose a planning tool that is appropriate for your business? Follow the guide!
Planning management: which functionalities are necessary?
Choosing a good planning software means choosing a versatile tool: it must not only manage schedules, that's obvious, but must also serve you in the management of human resources and material resources.
Indeed, in addition to planning management, most software now offer additional features that you can't do without after discovering them: your planning software must allow you to plan all the holidays, RTT, sick leave or unjustified absences. Your planning software must also allow you to easily display the daily, weekly or monthly schedule of each employee. For material resources, this is a matter of course: for each activity, your employee must know, via the planning software, which material will be needed for the task at hand. Project management is also becoming more and more common. A good planning software can cross tasks and interactions between employees, where projects require collaboration between departments, for example. A real plus for collaborative projects.
Planning management: what are your needs?
For a planning tool such as a planning software to be adapted to the use you wish to make of it, you must first analyse the needs of your company. In this sense, it is time to evaluate your activity, to define your expectations... And above all, what do you expect from a planning tool? A better distribution of tasks between the different employees of your company, a possibility to follow all the production, a tool to analyse all the activities carried out by each employee, the opportunity to have a better management of the tools necessary to work in your company?
From a purely operational point of view, what do you want this planning software to bring to your employees? That it allows them to manage their own schedules, that it helps to avoid time conflicts, that it allows teams to access their schedules 24 hours a day, that it plans the use of company resources more efficiently, that it allows employees to clock in and clock out their days off?
Finally, and after analyzing the features of a planning software or your expectations in this tool, pay attention to the ergonomics of the planning software you are going to choose. Choose a tool that is simple and easy to manage on a daily basis.
It is also necessary to take into account the ergonomics of the software as well as its ease of use. Indeed, you may not be the only one to use it, and it must therefore remain accessible. Do you want to handle software in the cloud or locally, does the software need to be regularly updated, can it be coupled with other tools to provide you with the data you need, will the software be able to evolve with the growth of your company, is there an iOS version and an Android version of the software that will allow your employees to access it anytime and anywhere, is the tool intuitive for everyone or does it require training? These are all questions you need to answer before choosing your planning software.