User:Geert Vanhove/sandbox

Binocs is a software as a service (SaaS) application for resource planning that is developed and marketed by Bluecrux CVBA. The software is designed for business environments where multiple highly skilled resources perform services for multiple projects combined with routine work.

Business requirements for resource planning
Bluecrux captured the initial business requirements during 2013 in collaboration with two global pharmaceutical fortune 500 enterprises. The focus domain was in the area of quality management, Research and development and regulatory affairs. These departments expressed following critical requirements:


 * Support a matrix organization of demand managers and specialized delivery teams. The term "Demand manager" refers to the role of collecting the work requirements fro one or more deliverables.
 * Meet specific requirements to combine work demand coming from projects and routine operations.
 * Mix named resource allocation with competence pool assignments.
 * The planning horizon shall cover short (weeks) to long term (years). The short term work might be planned in detail while the work in the far future is specified on a high level.
 * Teams shall be able to standardize the services they deliver. This includes efforts, lead times, work sequences and work batching rules.
 * All users must be able to enter data or analyse the planned work. The user experience shall be low-threshold.
 * A planning algorithm shall optimize the resource capacity utilization.
 * All users shall be empowered to evaluate what-if scenarios.
 * The solution shall be designed to operate in large corporations, supporting collaboration across multiple teams and organizational departments. End-to-end demand reaching more than 200.000 tasks, shall be resource optimized in less than 10 seconds.

!!!see quora for revised text

After a period (2013-2014) of prototyping and algorithm optimization, Bluecrux decided in 2014 to invest in cloud based business application that addresses these particular needs. The first commercial release of Binocs was in June 2015.

Bluecrux
Bluecrux CVBA is a private company that offers solutions and consultancy services in the area of supply chain and operations management. Bluecrux is the result of a merger in December 2015 of Bluegrass Consulting and The Crux, both founded in 2011. Priorly the founders were partner at S&V Management Consultants, which was acquired in 2011 by PwC, one of the Big Four accounting firms.