Insights Classic: Utilization Dashboard

Overview

The standard Utilization dashboard gives you complete visibility into how billable and non-billable resources are being leveraged across your organization. Taking into account member workweeks and billability targets, it gives you up-to-date utilization metrics, comparisons on how members are doing tracking their actual time versus scheduled and allocated time, and how they compare to their targets.

The standard Utilization tabs, starting with the most frequently accessed, are:

• Utilization by Month
• Utilization by Week
• All Actual Hours Breakdown
• All Hours Compare
• Performance to Target
• Productive Utilization
• Outlook by Week
• Out of Office
  
  

Defining Utilization

Utilization is, in a word, productivity. Every company defines productivity differently, and with Kantata OX Insights, you can calculate utilization in a variety of ways using filters. This way, you can ensure reports align with how you calculate utilization.

It is recommended that you first determine how you want to calculate utilization, and then make it a Saved View on your account so you don’t have to set it each time.

General Utilization

Setting your utilization filters to All defines your utilization across the board.

It is calculated using this formula:
Utilization by Billable Projects

When you set the Project Default filter to Billable, Insights only considers any time entry on a project whose default task is set to billable as selected in the Financials section of Project Settings. Billable time entries on non-billable projects are ignored; this is useful if you want to include something like “Re-work” into a client billable project, but not have the non-billable time entry affect a member’s billable utilization.

The equation for this type of billable utilization is:

Utilization by Time Entry Hours

With the Time Entry Billable? filter set to true, this calculates billable utilization using only billable time entries, regardless of the project default setting.

The equation for this type of billable utilization is: 
Utilization for Billable Time on Only Billable Projects

Finally, setting Project Default to Billable and Time Entry Billable? to true will calculate billable utilization without billable time entries on non-billable projects.

The equation for this type of billable utilization is: 

Target Effectivity

As a dynamic input when defining utilization, you can toggle Target Effectivity on and off. 

• Off—By default, it is off. This means that it is a static target that uses only the value that is currently entered as the member's billable utilization target in the Account Members Details side panel. This can change depending on the member's billable utilization without a selected time frame.
• On—When selected, changes the value from a static target to the effective target. This means the value changes depending on the member's billable utilization within a selected time frame.

Target Effectivity is determined by a member's billable utilization target, found in the Financials section of the Account Member Details side panel.

If no billable utilization target has been entered, it is assumed that utilization is 100%. If you want to filter out members from the report, enter 0 for their billable utilization target.

Utilization by Month

Reports in the Utilization by Month tab are some of the more popular ones in Insights. They show you the actual performance to date (PTD), as well as scheduled performance to date and allocated performance to date.

• Actual PTD—Uses the billable utilization you define to calculate performance up to today. For example, if you select the current month and today is the 15th, this will only have utilization current to the 14th of the month. If a member has time off in the period, it is excluded in the calculation.
• Scheduled PTD—Uses the same billable utilization as Actual PTD to calculate the scheduled billable utilization up to today.
• Allocated PTD—Calculates billable utilization up to today the same way as actuals to show allocated billable utilization performance to date. The project hours that are allocated need to be on billable projects to be considered.

The Utilization by User and Month table lets you drill deeper into the details. Selecting a name automatically filters for that user.

Utilization by Week

Reports in the Utilization by Week tab give you a weekly view of actual performance to date (PTD), scheduled PTD, and allocated PTD.

• Actual PTD—Uses the billable utilization you define to calculate performance up to today. For example, if you select the current month and today is the 15th, this will only have utilization current to the 14th of the month. If a member has time off in the period, it is excluded in the calculation.
• Scheduled PTD—Uses the same billable utilization as Actual PTD to calculate the scheduled billable utilization up to today.
• Allocated PTD—Calculates billable utilization up to today the same way as actuals to show allocated billable utilization performance to date. The project hours that are allocated need to be on billable projects to be considered.

Selecting a name from the Utilization by User and Week table lets you drill deeper into the details. 

All Actual Hours Breakdown

Various time elements are put into different buckets in the Hours Breakdown tab so you can easily see how productive your company is being with its time. Reports in this tab tell you where your members spend most of their time. This way, you know how much time is spent on billable projects versus internal or PTO projects, how much unused time is logged compared to logged time, and more.

• Billable Hours—Refers to all hours on projects where the tasks are set to Billable in the Financials section Project Settings
• Productive (Non-Bill)—Refers to all hours on projects where the tasks are set as non-billable in the Financials section of Project Settings, and are not designated at [Admin], [Internal], or [PTO] projects.
• Admin/Internal—Refers to all hours logged to projects that start or end with the [Admin] or [Internal] naming convention. A good use of this tag is to log time to things like all company meetings, company events, or other items not considered productive towards a client.
• Time Off—Hours recorded as part of the Time Off feature or logged to a [PTO] project.
• Holidays—Hours recorded as a holiday as part of the Holiday Calendar feature.

From the table, you can select a User to get more detailed information, such as Actual versus Scheduled, and the variance. 

All Hours Compare

The Hours Compare tab provides an audit of actual hours, allocated hours, and scheduled hours. At a glance, you can see the ebb and flow over time, what projects have the most dedicated time, and how far off allocated and scheduled hours are from actual hours logged.

Adjust the date range to see how well resources were allocated and scheduled in the past, or to see what allocations look like at a future date. 

Selecting a member from the table narrows time down to the specific user's hours for each project. 

Performance to Target

The Performance to Target tab shows you how well performance goals are being met, and whether you can anticipate meeting them in the next six months.

Ideally, the Actual billable hours will trend with or above Target Billability. As Actual billable hours approach the current day, Allocated and Scheduled billable hours will extend with target billables for perhaps a couple of months, and then trail off as most project managers will not have projects planned that far ahead.

The Individual Performance to Target table shows a user’s performance to date. It also gives you a sense of where a user will be at the end of the year, including time off taken, company holidays, and time spent on administrative or internal projects. 

Productive Utilization

Productive utilization is the active tracking of what you consider to be productive hours versus the amount potential hours a member has in a week. This can be activities such as development, enablement, training, or however your organization defines productive time.

It is calculated by taking all hours logged on the account except for hours logged in [Admin], [Internal], or [PTO] projects. 

Productive utilization should almost always be closer to 100% than a normal billable utilization because there are more non-billable hours that are counted to this percentage.

Outlook by Week

The Outlook by Week tab shows you weekly scheduled and allocated utilization, which is useful for forecasting your billables against your target. If you are a resource manager or project manager, the reports in this tab are especially helpful to ensure user allocated hours are roughly equal to scheduled hours. 

The table shows both scheduled and allocated percents for each role and user, giving you a granular view to help you determine who needs to be scheduled or allocated more time. 

Out of Office

The Out of Office tab provides a comprehensive breakdown of company holiday time and employee time off. Time off is calculated using either the hours recorded as part of the Time Off feature or as time logged to a [PTO] project. The Time Off by User table shows time off totals by day, and by user.