5 Strategies to Optimise Capacity Utilisation
When you’re working to improve your business’ performance, don’t underestimate the value in making full use of the resources you already have. Optimising capacity utilisation is a key strategy for organisations aiming to maximise their productivity and profitability, importantly without incurring unnecessary costs.
As an IT-managed services provider, we know the power that optimising your IT infrastructure can have in increasing productivity and even retention among your staff, while also futureproofing your organisation and preventing threats to capacity.
Read on to learn how to improve capacity utilisation with five technology-focused strategies.
Capacity Utilisation Definition
At any point, imagine the resources currently in your organisation. Now, consider what percentage of these resources are currently in use to deliver value: your products or services. Capacity utilisation measures the amount of resources you are using in your organisation as a percentage of 100% or less.
As businesses rely on humans, processes and the market where events won’t go exactly to plan, it’s unlikely your organisation will achieve 100% capacity utilisation. For example, the average capacity utilisation in the UK from 1958-2020 was 72.83%.
Here are five strategies to optimise capacity utilisation:
- Monitor the Performance of Business-Critical Applications
- Get the Best Out of Your Devices
- Improve Your End User Experience
- Optimise Your IT Infrastructure
- Futureproof Your Network
1. Monitor the Performance of Business-Critical Applications
Whether it’s Teams or Office 365, modern businesses are run on applications. Applications help to boost your capacity utilisation, making work simpler and more efficient for employees. That is… until they break. That’s why we recommend being proactive and monitoring the performance of your essential applications to keep them running smoothly for your business.
When you’re working hard to make your business as productive as it can be, the last thing you want to realise is that you’re unwittingly applying the brakes with slow applications. To assess how well your applications are working in your business, you’ll need to look for:
- Users and locations impacted
- Server-side delays
- Databases running slowly
- Slow web transactions
2. Get the Best Out of Your Devices
When considering how to increase capacity utilisation in your business, don’t forget hardware. At any time, picture the devices in your business. How many are working well, and how many are slowing your employees down?
Getting the best out of your devices means finding a balance between replacing your worst-performing devices and reducing replacement spend on devices that are old, but still working well.
While gaining visibility over your devices can help you make informed decisions to optimise the capacity utilisation of your hardware, it can also help you maximise the productivity of your employees. If you’ve ever felt the frustration of a slow laptop or repeated service desk calls for a device that’s at the end of its life, you’ll know the potential time and energy that can be saved by having these issues managed proactively for you.
If you need support with Digital Experience Management (DEM) across your organisation, our Device Observability service can help you apprehend and get to the bottom of hardware issues before users even spot them.
3. Improve Your End User Experience
While it’s widely accepted that user experience is crucial for our customers, considering UX for your employees is just as important to optimise your capacity utilisation. When you understand how your employees are using your IT, whether in the office or working remotely, you’re better able to identify and fix inefficiencies.
Tracking user experience also allows you to measure the impact of any changes you make to your IT system so you can see and mitigate any productivity loss from updates. Understanding common issues also means you can automate remediation, increasing capacity utilisation for your IT Service Desk.
4. Optimise Your IT Infrastructure
Your infrastructure platforms form the backbone of your business, allowing the wheels to turn and your business to grow. That’s why failures in your infrastructure can be so costly to your capacity utilisation, resulting in a loss of productivity, revenue and potentially even reputation.
Monitoring your IT infrastructure allows you to detect performance or configuration issues early, before they can cause major incidents for your business. By putting the work in to optimise your IT infrastructure, you’ll be better able to support your teams with access to the resources and applications they need to deliver your products or services. This can be particularly important for critical services such as the NHS health boards we’ve worked with to improve their Digital Experience Management.
5. Futureproof Your Network
Our final strategy to optimise capacity utilisation is making sure your network is able to scale with your business, while also fitting your current needs. Whether your infrastructure is in the cloud, virtual environments or your premises, having visibility across your networks allows you to identify and investigate shifts in network behaviour so you can fix issues early.
Actions you can take to futureproof your network can include:
- Identifying the root cause of network issues to minimise their impact on your business.
- Tracking current and future demands of your users, ensuring your network can adapt.
- Automating your network performance tracking so IT teams can focus on optimisation.
While IT networking has long been associated with complexity and repetition, we believe networking holds tremendous potential for businesses and organisations.
How We Can Help
We hope this article has given you actionable strategies to optimise capacity utilisation in your business and underscored the importance of proactively monitoring your systems.
At Net Consulting, we offer Digital Experience Management that cuts through complexity and helps you deliver the services your people need. From monitoring applications and devices to improving your end-user experience, we can help you improve your capacity utilisation through optimised IT services.
Contact us to learn more about how we can support your organisation.
