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How many staff do I need on at what times? This is all about assessing your workload. Once you have your workload you can convert it into man hours. If you have a flat workload, you just need to know how many staff you need at one time. If you have a time independent workload, you just need the overall yearly workload. If you have a variable workload, you need to make an assessment of the workload for every hour of every day. E.g. if you have a factory and you want a production line with five stations to always be filled then you need five staff on at all times. You then convert this into man hours, so five people mean five man hours. You then take the number of hours you want it to be operational (365 * 24 = 8,760) and multiply it by the man hours per hour giving a workload of 43,800 man hours per year. You can either attend our workload training course or have us assess your workload as part of our bespoke consultancy.

Staffing Levels There are three questions you need to ask about staffing levels: • How many staff do I need on at what times? • How many staff do I need to meet the workload? • What is my current capacity?

What is my current Capacity? Most operations are not green-fields sites, so we have to work with what we have. Knowing how many staff you need is all well and good, but if the operation can't afford that staffing level or you don't want to loose key skills just because of a current lull in the workload, then you need to know what your current capacity is. Your capacity is based on how much can you produce given a set amount of people, equipment and infrastructure. Whilst working out your capacity with a given amount of equipment and infrastructure is easy. The people part is far more complicated. Predicting the amount of production a group of people will produce is difficult because of holidays, absences, and rules governing the operation. We take all of these factors into consideration in order to estimate your current capacity, give advice on how you could increase this capacity if required, make the operation more efficient, make the most of your budget and improve your performance by prioritising workload. It is not just manufacturing operations which need to know their capacity, service operations need to know too and due to the complicated nature of the people management, most use trial and error as opposed to the detailed calculation. Trial and error is a perfectly valid method however the errors are very expensive. If you err on being overstaffed, it is inefficient. If you err on being understaffed it could lead to the loss of customers and lower profits because the work is not completed. We can take any operation, do an assessment of the workload or predict your future workload. Then calculate how many staff you need, what your current capacity is, what the maximum capacity would be given any number of staff and advise you on how to maximise your efficiency. Capacity estimation is a standard part of our Business Health Check, we can also do these calculations as part of our bespoke consultancy. If you would like to discuss this topic with us please call or email to find out how we can help you.