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Can you show resource utilization using a chart?

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Josh_Colina1
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

The Timeline view in the base has great resource utilization functionality that isn't yet available in the interfaces. I'm wondering if there's a good solution for using a chart to demonstrate utilization over time without having to go into the core base.

Full Context

My company uses Airtable as our primary work management system - we assign employees to tasks, which have estimated times to complete (as we bill our clients hourly for work). I'd like for our operations team to be able to easily see how much work an employee has day-to-day within a given time frame. In our base, tasks have a start and end date. I can use a WORKDAY_DIFF() formula to return the number of days a task is scheduled to take, and then use a simple division of the overall time value by that number to get the  hours per day the task takes. The intention here is to roughly estimate how much work the employee has to do (i.e. the sum total of work assigned shouldn't exceed 8hrs a day per employee to accomplish)

While the Timeline view can accomplish this natively, most of our ops team prefers to work out of Interfaces. Ideally, I would use a chart to demonstrate an employee's estimated workload over time, but charts require date data that exists in a field and (at least as far as I know) won't recognize the inferred dates that exist between the start and end of a task.

For example - if an employee is assigned a 3-hour task on Monday that is due on Wednesday, and a 3-hour task on Tuesday that is due Thursday, I'd like to be able to graph that their workload Monday through Friday is (M) 1hr - (T) 2hr - (W) 2hr - (Th) 1hr- (F) 0hr. Instead, I can only demonstrate the total amount of work on the due date, so the graph looks more like (M) 0hr - (T) 0hr - (W) 3hr - (Th) 3hr - (F) 0hr.

This might be tenable if the framing is "this is the amount of work the employee has to complete within a timeframe," but breaks down in usefulness if there are larger and longer-term tasks, as it then looks like the employee has weeks with nothing on their plate.

Has anybody else tried to build out a similar interface? What solutions have you come up with for this?

2 Replies 2

I haven't tried anything this complicated with a timeline on an interface, but I do have several simple pages using them.  The first thing I would say is that you have to be on a Pro or Enterprise plan to use the timeline option.  If you're on a lower level plan and the benefit would justify the upgrade it sounds like you've put enough thought into this and could make it work.

@Josh_Colina1 

You could have a button/link to a shared read-only view of the timeline view to click into more resourcing details as needed. 
+1 for this being available on interfaces