Appointment Booking & Resource Capacity Planning Updates in Qmatic Experience Cloud

Blog title: Appointment Booking & Resource Capacity Planning in Qmatic Experience Cloud

Iryna Ananko |August 16 2023 | 4 min

Efficient resource capacity planning is key when managing your appointments as it enables services to become bookable and accessible for customers only if the needed resources are available.

Today, Qmatic Experience Cloud’s Book and Plan apps for appointment booking and resource capacity planning offer users a new adaptive way of planning by combining the tools for efficient resource capacity management.

Plan provides you with a comprehensive overview of appointments and resource capacity on a daily, weekly, and monthly interval. This holistic visibility empowers you to allocate resources efficiently to meet customer demands without overwhelming your staff.

Simplified Resource Management: Introducing Virtual Resource Pools

There are two primary methods available with Plan for resource management:

Virtual resource pool management.
Management of individual resources and their working schedules

You can select one or combine both based on your business needs.

Let’s dive into virtual resources in more detail!

A virtual resource pool is an abstraction for grouping resources with specific qualifications, which are assumed as required for providing the customer with the service (-es). Once the resources get mapped with resource pools, it allows operating with their capacity number instead of dealing with specific resource schedule alignments, which makes the overall resource planning process more straightforward, easier to control, and more adaptive to changes.

With the updated Pool Configuration, you can easily:

Create the necessary resource pools and associate them with services/products offered
Set up the baseline for capacity, which would correspond to a long-term resource allocation plan based on inaccurate service/product demand forecasting.

Pool configuration in Qmatic Experience Cloud

This allows you to design an initial resource load and allocation plan and make your services available for bookings several months ahead.

Respond rapidly to change with Plan

An extensive list of factors can affect human resource planning, so there is a need to adjust continuously the resource workload in reaction to different changes.

With the enhanced Plan, you can monitor workflow trends, quickly reallocate idle resources, and adjust service schedules so you stay on top of the resource’s workload.

Also, the improved resource pool graph visualizes the capacity planning summary, helping to consult the planned resource's workload versus actual appointment bookings to get a heads up if there is an issue with capacity planning and find a way to get back on track.

Resource pool graph

Resource Pool Graph

The new Edit Capacity feature opens the possibility to make capacity corrections by adding deviations for the specific hours/timespans during the working day and for the whole day or even several weeks ahead.

Edit capacity Edit Capacity feature in Plan