Full Time Equivalent (FTE)

The FTE is a measure of the resource requirement for a given process over a defined period, for example the number of account clerks required to deal with 200 invoices per week following a given process. The FTE is obviously dependent on the volume and duration of associated activities.

FTE = (Number of resource types for activity x Volume through activity x Duration of activity) / Working period

In this example, the accounts clerk in the third activity (highlighted in green) deals with 7 invoices per day, each taking 10 hours. The costing defaults have been set as a 7 hours per day and 5 days per week. The FTE is worked out as follows:

FTE = (1 resource x 7 invoices x 10 hours each) / 7 hrs per day = 10

This calculated FTE implies that 10 account clerks are required to deal with the workload based on the current working day settings. If you consider the total FTE for the account clerk in the diagram:

Total FTE = 1.43 + 10 + 0.02 = 11.45

Running a resource-based costing report can list the FTEs for a given resource across a specific diagram or scope of diagrams.

Displaying activity costs