Capacity overview

The capacity overview is a display format in Field Service Management that shows the available personnel resources and their utilization in aggregated form. While the planning board visualizes individual assignments per employee, the capacity overview provides a comprehensive overview of the capacity of one or more resources over a period of time. The goal is to quickly show planners where there are excess capacities or bottlenecks.

The Innosoft FSM software, for example, provides a capacity overview of all projects/orders, showing at a glance how many technician hours are planned per week/month.

This overview can be displayed as a bar chart or table, showing that Team A is 90% utilized in April, while Team B is only 50% utilized. Target and actual values are often compared: How many hours are available (e.g., 10 technicians * 8 hours * 20 days = 1,600 hours per month) and how many hours are booked for assignments.

A typical capacity overview might look like this: The rows show teams or departments, the columns show calendar weeks. The fields contain a number or a bar representing the utilization (% or hours occupied). Color codes help to identify the situation – e.g., green for <80% utilization (still buffer), yellow for 80-100%, red for >100% (overload). This shows when additional resources may be needed or when there is scope for additional orders.

The capacity overview does not only refer to personnel. If necessary, it can also include machines or rental equipment if these also have limited capacities. However, in the field service context, the focus is usually on personnel deployment (workforce management).

Innosoft makes it possible to identify free or overloaded groups at a glance in the resource overview with a timeline. You can also use filters to view the capacity overview for a specific branch or team, for example.

The combination of the planning board (detailed view) and capacity overview (aggregate view) gives the dispatcher full control: on the one hand, they can see every single assignment bar in detail, and on the other hand, they can see the overall utilization.

The capacity overview is indispensable for strategic planning, especially in larger service organizations with hundreds of orders per month. Visualization makes complex planning tangible. That is why the capacity overview is one of the core functions of a good dispatching system.