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Managing Labour Capacity Without Personnel Management Module

Refer to Product Ideas
Himanshu
  • Account name: Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre
  • Region: APAC
  • Client version (Enterprise): 25.3
  • Description of the issue:
    • BCEC’s AV Production Managers can over‑order Labour (Class 5) on events that overlap in the same time bands. Labour does not use inventory logic in Enterprise, so the system does not show an “available balance exceeded” warning. The client asked if Labour can be reclassified as Equipment/Consumables (Class 2/3) to trigger inventory-style checks
  • What does the client want to do? Why do they want to do this?
    • They want Enterprise to warn or stop users when ordered labour exceeds the number of operators the venue actually has available, so they can prevent over-allocation and late staffing issues.
  • Please give a descriptive user story. Often clients want to solve a problem by doing X. If we know the problem, sometimes it can be solved via Y.
    • As an AV Production Manager, when I add Class 5 Labour to an event that overlaps with others, I want Enterprise to alert me if the total requested operators for that time band exceed our operator pool so that I can right-size the request or escalate before committing to staffing.
  • What you've already tried or suggested. Why does this not work?
    • Reclassifying Labour to Class 2/3 is not recommended. Classes 2/3 are for inventory and purchase orders; Class 5 is for labour scheduling. Reclassifying removes labour behaviours and distorts reporting/financials.
    • Personnel Management module is not recommended because it is a legacy module and not being developed further.
  • Not advised yet:
    • Using Enterprise alone only provides labour demand (sum of Class 5 labour by date/time band), but Enterprise cannot store labour capacity without the legacy module.
    • Proposed approach is to partner with a rostering/workforce provider (such as Humanforce or Deputy) to hold the labour capacity (availability by date/time band/skill) while Enterprise continues to be used for demand. Production then compares demand vs capacity to identify over-allocation.
  • Business impact if not resolved:
    • Operational risk of over-committing staff, last-minute external sourcing, overtime costs, pressure on AV/Production teams, and potential failure to deliver contracted labour. Misconfiguring labour as inventory would cause long-term data integrity and reporting issues.
  • Attach relevant files (such as screenshots) - NA
  • Links to articles where you've looked for solutions and also other steps you've taken to research the issue.

Other notes: Their AV team is adamant and asking why all their class 5 labour resources can't be replaced as Class 2 Equipment Resources.

Anthony Costantino Martin Wooding  - Curious to hear your thoughts on how do large organisations would plan out this scenario or deal with limitations.

Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • Seth Halvaksz

    Following

  • Anthony Costantino

    Himanshu this one slipped through the cracks. Where did you end up with the client? 

    The large organizations I'm dealing generally will find additional labor to meet demand, so overbooking isn't as big of a worry. Generally, event managers will collaborate (via email or internal chat tool) with their operation dept heads to confirm labor requirements are achievable and if not, alternate plans. Dept heads usually track this outside the system in Excel or in a dedicated labor scheduling / timesheet system.

  • Himanshu

    Thanks Tony, I didn't progressed with this yet as i am still figuring out on where would people would generally store the labour capacity. I am inclined to say that we don't have a way to store labour capacities in enterprise, as things like skill, availability, pool could be (should be?) maintained in the rostering software which would provide summary to calculate and forecast the data, if this is our stand on this!

  • Anthony Costantino

    yes, the recommendation here is to look outside of Enterprise for workforce management. Keep an eye on our roadmap… looks like we're exploring partnerships with three strong workforce management apps pretty seriously right now.

  • Seth Halvaksz

    Himanshu as Tony mentioned, we are considering partnerships for workforce management.

    Could you add this to Product Feedback so we have this documented? If you could post the link here for reference.

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