The guide
Guide: capacity planning in a Swiss SME
Capacity planning means comparing upcoming work with each person’s truly available time. In a Swiss SME that sells projects, it protects the teams, the deadlines promised to clients and the profitability of engagements all at once.
What is capacity planning?
Capacity planning, also called resource planning, answers two questions: who is working on what in the coming weeks, and does the team have enough time for everything that has been promised? It sets the load, coming from signed and likely projects, against capacity, coming from employment contracts.
For an agency, an engineering office, a consultancy or a fiduciary, it is the tool that avoids two costly mistakes: accepting an engagement nobody has time to deliver, and leaving some employees underused while others pile up overtime. Good planning is done by the week, over a horizon of one to three months, and is updated as soon as a project, an absence or a priority changes.
How do you calculate a team’s real capacity?
Real capacity starts from contractual time: for example 42 hours a week in the company, multiplied by each person’s activity rate. An employee working 80 % therefore has about 33.6 hours. You then remove approved leave, public holidays in the working canton, training and known absences.
You also need to reserve time for non-billable work: internal meetings, administration, pre-sales. Depending on the trade, 15 to 30 % of time cannot be planned on client projects. Remember that holiday entitlement is five weeks until age 20 and then at least four weeks under CO art. 329a. Numezis calculates this availability automatically from HR data, so planning rests on the time really available and not on a theoretical full time.
How do you prevent employee overload?
Overload rarely shows up in a single project plan: each project manager plans reasonably, but the same person is called on by three projects at once. Only a consolidated view per person and per week reveals the problem.
The Labour Act limits maximum weekly working time to 45 hours for most office and service employees (art. 9), and overtime must remain exceptional and be compensated or paid under CO art. 321c. To prevent overload, set an alert threshold, for example 90 %, review planning every week and arbitrate priorities between projects rather than stacking them. Numezis flags every future overload and the agent proposes a reassignment to an available person with the right skill.
How do you plan a new project before signing it?
Before committing to a delivery date, simulate the project’s load on the team. Estimate the hours per profile and per phase, place them in the calendar and look at which weeks become critical. If the team is already at 95 % over the period, you will need to push back the start, subcontract part of the work or give up another priority.
This simulation also provides a commercial argument: a realistic date that is met is worth more than an ambitious date that is missed. Opportunities in the sales pipeline can be taken into account with a probability, to anticipate hiring needs. In Numezis, a project in preparation can be planned without being confirmed, and the assignment becomes effective when the opportunity is won.
Resource planning: spreadsheet or software?
A planning spreadsheet works as long as a single person keeps it up to date and the team is small. It quickly becomes wrong: leave recorded elsewhere, activity rates forgotten, projects added without an update, and no comparison with the time actually logged.
Capacity planning software connected to HR and projects solves these problems. Approved leave reduces availability automatically, assignments come from projects, and logged time lets you compare planned and actual. Planning in turn feeds each project’s estimate at completion. For a Swiss SME, check the handling of cantonal public holidays, part-time work and data hosting in Switzerland: Numezis brings these elements together in one system.