Demand & Supply Planning

Available from: v1.0.29

Demand & Supply Planning gives your operations, HR, and project teams a unified view of workforce needs versus available capacity. The feature pulls demand signals directly from your projects and contracts, matches them against your workforce supply, and uses AI to recommend corrective actions before capacity gaps become a problem.

How It Works

1. Demand Forecasting from Projects & Contracts

The platform continuously reads your active projects and contracts to derive expected resource demand:

Projects — Headcount requirements, role types, and time windows are extracted from project plans.
Contracts — Contractual commitments (e.g., dedicated FTEs, service level obligations) are translated into staffing demand.

Demand is expressed as a timeline of required capacity per role, team, or skill set, so you can see not just how many people you need, but when and with what capabilities.

2. Supply Matching

Available workforce supply is automatically computed from employee profiles, current assignments, and scheduled availability. The planning engine maps supply against demand in real time, highlighting:

Status	Meaning
Balanced	Supply meets demand within acceptable thresholds
Surplus	More capacity is available than currently demanded
At Risk	Demand is approaching the ceiling of available supply
Overcommitted	Demand exceeds supply — action required

3. AI-Powered Reallocation Suggestions

Whenever an Overcommitted or At Risk condition is detected, the built-in AI agent automatically generates reallocation recommendations. Suggestions may include:

Internal reallocation — Reassigning an underutilised employee from a lower-priority project.
Timeline adjustment — Shifting a project phase to flatten the demand curve.
Hiring flag — Raising a headcount request when no internal option can close the gap.

Suggestions are ranked by feasibility and impact. Planners can accept, dismiss, or modify each suggestion directly from the planning dashboard.

4. Actuals vs. Planned (Time Tracking Integration)

Actual hours logged through the time tracking module are fed back into the planning engine on a rolling basis. This enables:

Variance reporting — Compare planned demand against actual consumption for any project, team, or period.
Forecast refinement — Historical actuals improve the accuracy of future demand estimates over time.
Early warning signals — If actual burn rate diverges significantly from the plan, an alert is surfaced in the planning view.

Prerequisite: Time tracking must be enabled and employees must be logging time against the relevant projects for actuals data to appear in planning views.

Getting Started

Navigate to Planning → Demand & Supply in the main navigation.
Select the planning horizon (week / month / quarter).
Review the demand timeline populated from your active projects and contracts.
Check the supply match summary — any Overcommitted periods will be highlighted in red.
Click View Suggestions on any overcommitted period to see AI-generated reallocation options.
Accept or modify suggestions; accepted suggestions are reflected immediately in the supply view.
Enable time tracking on your projects to unlock actuals-vs-planned comparison.

Key Concepts

Term	Definition
Demand	The workforce capacity required to fulfil project deliverables and contract obligations
Supply	Available employee capacity, accounting for existing assignments and leave
Reallocation	Moving supply from one project/team to another to resolve a capacity imbalance
Actuals	Real hours logged via time tracking, used to validate and refine the plan
Variance	The difference between planned demand and actual consumption

Notes & Limitations

Demand signals are derived from structured project and contract data in the platform. Demand from external systems is not yet ingested automatically.
Reallocation suggestions are advisory — they do not automatically reassign employees or modify project plans.
Actuals data has up to a 1-hour lag from time tracking submissions.