Uncovering inefficiencies in operational planning

Introduction

Operational planning is never perfect. Often, hidden inefficiencies limit how much work you can get done. Even when a plan looks good on paper, there may be unused capacity, or missing skills holding your operation back.

In this guide, we’ll explain how Timefold technology helps you find and reduce inefficiencies today and what new capabilities we’re building.

The role of planning optimization software

Optimization software takes complex planning problems (like assigning employees to shifts, or technicians to field service jobs) and searches for near-optimal solutions.

You give Timefold your resources, requirements, and business priorities. We optimize according to these goals, but we can only work with what you provide. That means if your available skill mix, resource levels, or structures are limiting, the optimization process should uncover these.

Good optimization software should not just return a plan - it should also help you steer your operations. You should be able to find out where you are most constrained, and which changes would have the highest impact.

A simple way to think about the role of optimization software is: “With the resources I have available today, how can I get one more job done?”

Common inefficiencies in operational planning

Operational inefficiencies can take many forms, typically related to either available resources or how the service is being delivered:

Related to available resources

  • Resource underutilization: Employees, machines, or vehicles remain idle when they could be more productive.

  • Suboptimal resource mix: You have enough resources overall, but not with the right combination of skills, skill levels, and equipment. Spotting these can inform who to cross-train.

  • Pairing preferences: Jobs that prefer specific pairings (like a senior and a junior worker) are more difficult to staff correctly.

  • Resource overutilization: Some employees are overloaded with work, leading to burnout and increased employee turnover when this imbalance is sustained.

Related to service delivery

  • Bottlenecks during peak times: Shortages at critical times can create missed opportunities, unassigned work, or reduced efficiency. Spotting recurring peak-time gaps can inform capacity planning.

  • Job interdependencies: Complex dependencies between jobs make it harder to flexibly assign resources where they’re needed most. Mapping these dependencies and allowing more flexibility in how they’re handled, can unlock capacity.

  • Geographical imbalances: Some locations consistently suffer from shortages — either because they’re harder to reach or because too few people or resources are available nearby. Identifying these patterns can inform smarter hiring, or service area adjustments.

How Timefold helps today

Timefold’s current technology already provides a strong foundation for uncovering inefficiencies:

  • Resource-limited planning: In real-life planning operations, there are often not enough people or resources to do every job in the provided planning window.
    In such situations, Timefold lets you assign priorities to jobs - distinguishing mandatory work from optional work. Even when resources are too scarce to complete all mandatory jobs, Timefold still produces a near-optimal plan.

  • Metrics on workload and resource usage: Timefold provides detailed metrics allowing you to compare the workload, as well as the percentage of mandatory and optional work that could be assigned. Additionally, fairness metrics give you insight into how the workload is distributed.

  • Optimize broader segments: Many organizations segment their planning problems - for example, by planning routes separately for each city or province - because their optimization tools can’t scale. Timefold’s highly performant optimization technology often lets you optimize much larger segments. This broader view enables you to find efficiencies that are impossible to spot in smaller, isolated plans.

Specific features by model

Employee Shift Scheduling

  • Demand-based scheduling: Shifts are scheduled to match hourly demand curves as closely as possible, minimizing both undercapacity as well as overcapacity

  • Alternative shifts: Sometimes work doesn’t need to happen at a specific timing, and multiple options are possible (e.g., a product demo could happen at 09:00, 11:00, 13:00, or 15:00). By specifying multiple alternatives, Timefold can smartly assign them to maximize overall efficiency.

Field Service Routing

  • Cost optimization with activation costs: Timefold’s routing model optimizes not just route distances, but also employee activation costs, ensuring that when employees or contractors are activated, they’re not underused.

Reality check: plan vs. reality

One of the most powerful ways to uncover inefficiencies is to compare an optimized plan with what actually happened. This is what a reality check does: it shows you where the optimized plan and reality diverge, and by how much.

How it works

You can run a reality check today using the Timefold Platform’s evaluation and comparison capabilities:

  1. Submit your planning problem for optimization: Submit your dataset for solving without pre-filling assignments, so Timefold finds the best possible plan.

  2. After execution, record what actually happened in a new dataset: Once the plan has been executed, submit the same dataset using ?operation=NONE and include the real-world assignments that were actually carried out. The platform evaluates the dataset without solving it, computing constraint scores, broken constraints, justifications, and KPI metrics for the actual plan as-is.

  3. Compare the two datasets: Use the Comparison UI to place the evaluated dataset (reality) and the optimized dataset side by side.

The result is a clear, metrics-based view of where reality forces divergence and how to incorporate that into future optimizations.

This feedback loop helps operations managers make smarter decisions about staffing, scheduling policies, and where flexibility would pay off.

Tips for getting the most insight today

If you want to dig deeper into finding and reducing inefficiencies, here are some techniques you can try:

  • Reality check: Compare the plan against the reality using the Comparison UI. See the section above for a step-by-step explanation.

  • Analysis on unassigned jobs: When jobs can’t be assigned, calling the Recommendation APIs for these jobs help you understand why, whether it’s missing skills, or conflicting requirements.

  • Exploring what-if simulations: Try adding or removing employees with specific skills when submitting planning problems and see how much your productivity changes. Test different shift patterns, skill mixes, or team setups.

  • Experiment with soft constraints: Soft constraints may add hidden inefficiencies. Try disabling or relaxing them temporarily (by using configuration profiles) and see how much more work you can get done. This can reveal the impact and cost of certain preferences, and where flexibility would pay off.

  • Expand your planning problem: Instead of planning separately for smaller regions or organizational units, see if you can combine these multiple segments into a larger problem using Timefold’s scalable models. This can unlock economy-of-scale improvements that isolated planning cannot achieve.

What’s next?

We are working on exciting new features to make inefficiency analysis even easier and more actionable:

Efficiency X-ray

Efficiency X-ray reports will automatically analyze several planning problems over time and generate clear reports highlighting operational bottlenecks. It will:

  • Identify skills and skill levels that limit how many jobs can be completed.

  • Highlight time windows where resource shortages reduce efficiency.

  • Highlight geographical areas that are particularly constrained.

Efficiency X-ray will focus both on unassigned jobs and on difficult-to-assign jobs, giving you a comprehensive view of bottlenecks in your operation. By analyzing this, you’ll create a feedback loop between advance capacity planning and operational reality.

This will empower operations managers to make smarter decisions about hiring, training, cross-training, resource allocation, and investment.

Conclusion

Optimization is not just about finding a good plan, it’s about learning where your resources, structures, and assumptions are holding you back. Timefold helps you identify bottlenecks and opportunities today, including through reality checks that compare optimized plans with actual execution, and with upcoming features like Efficiency X-ray it will be even easier to act on those insights.

By continuously learning from your plans, you can build operations that are more efficient, and adapt quicker, preparing you better for the future.