Wouldn’t it be nice?

Back in 1966 The Beach Boys have asked Wouldn't it be nice if we were older. I bet it would – if we could do that for a moment and then come back to our original surroundings. But here are some more thoughts –
Wouldn’t it be nice to calculate how much would it cost to enable our customers to have 2 hour time slots instead of 4 hours?
Wouldn’t it be nice to learn how many new employees you need to introduce a new line of service?
Wouldn’t it be nice to know whether you should approve a vacation request or not, making sure that your service level does not go down?
Wouldn’t it be nice to foresee the expected demand in the upcoming year and be able to plan accordingly?
Well – it is nice. Once you have the ability to automate scheduling, forecasting and planning, you also have the ability to test case scenarios and see what happens if…
What does automatic scheduling have to do with the ability to foresee how would a change of the slot window affect the business? Well that’s easy – an automatic process can be used to simulate different scenarios and compare them. It can also be used to tune the configuration so that it fits the ever changing business goals.
Integrated automatic processes, starting from forecast, going into planning, then scheduling and/or rostering and finally getting into analyzed results enables the ability to foresee how a new line of service might affect the bottom line. Wouldn’t that be nice…