Hello and welcome to the second and final part of our short series on resource booking. In our last entry, we defined resource booking and presented a few key reasons why it is so important in business today. In this article, I’ll be exploring the various resource booking tools available today along with how they work and how you stand to benefit by using them.
As you may remember from the last article on resource booking, there are three main reasons why it is important to develop and implement an effective booking strategy for your business. These three reasons are:
Reduction of waste
Reduction of waste by way of eliminating unnecessary mistakes in planning and booking ie. double booking and underbooking.
Analytics
The use of a well-organized resource booking strategy is an excellent way to collect relevant performance data for analysis after a job is completed. Booking tools consolidate this information into one place
Ease of operation
Applying a strong booking strategy produces ease of operation for team members and customers and as a result improves morale internally and eliminates image damaging mistakes externally.
As the benefits are very clear and apparent, you’re probably now wondering what exactly a strong resource booking actually looks like. A common theme in the articles I’ve written here is that it is important to acknowledge that logistical functions in business can truly be difficult. Business is complex in this day and age, and keeping track of everything is a trying bureaucratic process that can drain time and resources. For this reason, it is important to leverage the best tools at your disposal. Sometimes the easiest way isn’t necessarily the best way, but thankfully in this case easy and effective happen to align. There are many powerful tools available in the market today (the best of which are all digital of course), but to us here at Infowise one stands out above the rest; that tool is Sharepoint. Sharepoint is an intranet and cooperative work environment created by Microsoft and is a multifunctional digital enterprise tool used by countless institutions around the world. We’ve created a product that bolsters the user’s ability to customize the SharePoint workspace, and added the ability to create interactable and dynamic forms that collect, compute, and apply inputs. One of the use cases of this added functionality is the ability to create resource booking systems within Sharepoint using this product which we’ve called Ultimate Forms. Ultimate Forms comes prebuilt with a variety of resource booking tools out of the box, which oftentimes is more than adequate for the average business's needs.
Here are some typical asset management solutions :
Room and Equipment Reservation
Flight Reservation
Webinar Registration
These formatted forms all come predesigned with all relevant data fields and are capable of passing to and receiving from other forms and components in the SharePoint workspace. This functionality allows for forms to, for example, be distributed to team members to be filled out, and then for all the collected data to be aggregated and passed to the department responsible for applying the information collected, or even to automatically apply that information to an entirely separate form. In this way, a sort of web is created wherein resource planning is facilitated by these connections, and the confusion involved in modern business logistics is alleviated through the automation aspect of the toolset. These pre- structured forms can be customized to fit whatever needs a business may have, or built from the ground up for completely unique roles. The dynamic interactions that the collected data is used in are also completely customizable and can be connected to any other custom or out-of-the-box form in the workspace. Think of these predesigned forms as templates and jumping-off points that can either be used as they come or customized to fit niche roles that fit your business specifically.
Now that we’ve discussed some of the various resource booking templates Ultimate Forms comes with, I urge you to try a few out for yourself using our online demos. They’ll give you a better idea of exactly how the tools look and work. We made them in a way that no coding is required on the user end and all customizations can be made in the SharePoint interface, so there isn’t much of a learning curve when booting Ultimate Forms.
Thanks for stopping by to view this article and if you have any questions for me or the team please feel free to reach out or browse our rather extensive online documentation database. Until next time!
