Name: Ross Benton

Title: Senior Consultant  and Director

Business name: Safety Solutions

Industry: Safety  Consultants

Location: Rotorua

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1.     What problem were you trying to solve when you discovered PlanRight?

During the lock-down, we were starting to look at timing and planning peoples time. We were using spreadsheets but people couldn’t see what their utilisation would be over the coming month. We had a lot of information in WFM that we could potentially utilise so we started looking for ad-on's so we could still use the information we already had.

2.     What was the obstacle/s that would have prevented you from subscribing to PlanRight?

Pricing structure.  If you’ve got a 100 people and you want to hire another one, it's okay. But for small businesses, the pricing structure makes a difference.  

Bringing quotes through when you’re not doing lead management.  Why can you bring leads through to PlanRight but not quotes?  Leads do give you the ability to filter your quotes a bit more. We tend to filter on the bigger quotes now.  We have figured out how to use this.  In terms of pricing, this just costs a little bit more in WFM.

3.     Why did you choose PlanRight?

There weren’t many other options and I didn’t find any others that were worth trying.  It’s a hassle trying to bring data across manually to other scheduling tools.

4.     What did you find as a result of using PlanRight?

I don’t think we’ve been using it long enough to see savings or gains.  Although I’ve probably saved an hour a week in terms of my time and in processing individual information.

Each individual is able to go in and change the master copy of what they do.  As a Manager, it's useful to have the ability to go in an assign tasks each week.

I’ll put the leads into PlanRight and the other team members individually work on their own time plans too.

5.     What specific feature do you like most about PlanRight?

I was really looking for something that was drag and drop.  That’s a good feature.

6.     What are three other benefits of PlanRight?

Previously we were only getting people to forecast a month out.  Now with the forecast feature, it’s quite easy to forecast further out.  As a job comes in, it’s included in the plan, so useful to have that information further into the future.  The Forecast tab is also useful.

7.     Would you recommend PlanRight? Why?

From what I’ve seen of it so far, PlanRight provides the benefit of staff members being able to plan their own time and Managers allocating time.  It reduces the amount of time that managers need to spend collating the data.  

8.     Is there anything you’d like to add?

One of the things we've struggled with in the past is when one Project Manager allocates work to another staff member and then that work gets bumped.  It would be good to have away of signalling this. People can manage their own time and fit the work in and it would also be good if tasks had a hard finish time and some way of signalling this to ensure that work cannot be bumped.

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