Repair & Reuse · Question 01
Plan and forecast
The question
What is the most credible launch plan, and how do staffing, supplier delay and demand change dates, cost and capacity?
Plan a six-person launch at the end of week 12, with no schedule float. The arithmetic reaches 30 March 2026 for £218,400, leaving £21,600 below the £240,000 ceiling after the £12,000 contingency allowance. Both fit-out and equipment must finish on time. Treat this as a conditional target: the supplied data cannot establish a confidence level.
Keep the six-week integration → pilot → readiness sequence intact. Track supplier readiness alongside fit-out from the end of design. Six people can support only 132 of the assumed 140 weekly jobs; agree an eight-job weekly demand response before opening. A seventh person is a useful costed option, but is outside the six-person resource fixture.
Fictional what-if workspace. Changes stay in this tab and reset on reload; no record is saved and no external system is changed.
Try a launch scenario
Staff count means the same team is paid throughout the launch and remains available for steady-state operations. Demand changes service capacity and gross fee receipts, not the launch scope or task durations.
Quick comparisons:
Showing the supplied six-person baseline.
Scenario result
What determines the date?
A task is on a longest path if delaying it delays launch. At the baseline, fit-out and equipment tie: both are critical. The table gives the same information as the visual.
| Stage | Start → finish | Completion date | Dependency / float |
|---|
Cost reconciliation
Unallocated budget headroom is separate from the included £12,000 contingency. Neither amount is an approval or evidence that risks have been funded sufficiently.
Demand coverage
Compare the consequences
The four reference scenarios keep demand at 140 jobs per week. Your selected scenario uses your demand input. All use the same cost and productivity rules.
| Scenario | Launch week | Cost | Budget headroom | Capacity / demand | Unserved / week |
|---|
The decision: four people save £19,200 on launch cost but open two weeks late and leave 52 jobs per week unserved. A two-week supplier delay with six people adds £14,400 and moves opening to 13 April. Seven people do not accelerate launch; they raise capacity to 154 jobs at a £232,800 launch cost, conditional on a seventh person actually being available.
With six staff, each extra supplier week costs £7,200 in payroll; three extra weeks use all £21,600 of remaining headroom. This excludes any expediting charge or commercial effect of opening late. More than seven staff cannot meet this cost ceiling under the unchanged 12-week equipment path: eight cost £247,200.
Rules, assumptions and evidence
Sequence interpretation. “Integration, pilot and readiness each take two weeks after both fit-out and equipment are ready” does not explicitly say they are sequential. This plan conservatively interprets them as successive stages because pilot depends on an integrated service and readiness depends on pilot evidence. If all three could genuinely overlap, the formula would change; no such overlap or safety approval is assumed.
Staffing interpretation. All deployed staff contribute to the 24 staff-weeks of fit-out with perfectly divisible effort; equipment procurement proceeds in parallel without extra internal effort. The same headcount is paid for every elapsed week, including design, waiting and assurance. Role constraints, equipment sharing, absence, hub-by-hub allocation and switching losses are not provided. They could extend the plan.
Cost boundary. The fixed £120,000 is used once; the fixture does not itemise what it covers. No additional purchases, overtime, recruitment, expediting, tax, inflation, overheads, lost fees or operating costs are invented. £12,000 is a fixed contingency allowance, not a percentage and not added again as headroom. Gross weekly fees are not deducted from launch cost and are not a margin or viability forecast.
Calendar boundary. Week zero is 5 January 2026. A week is seven elapsed days. “Week 12” means the instant 12 weeks have elapsed, after readiness completes. Fractional-week completion dates round up to the next whole calendar day; cost retains the unrounded duration. This analytical model has no working-day calendar or holidays.
Supplied evidence · benchmark version 1.0.0
| Fixture reference | Supplied value | Use |
|---|---|---|
| case.durationWeeks; case.budget; case.baselineDate | 12 weeks; £240,000; 2026-01-05 | Target and comparison boundary |
| case.fixtures.designWeeks; fitoutStaffWeeks; equipmentLeadWeeks | 2 weeks; 24 staff-weeks; 4 weeks | Parallel work after design |
| case.fixtures.integrationWeeks; pilotWeeks; readinessWeeks | 2 weeks each | Sequential interpretation described above |
| case.fixtures.staff; staffWeeklyCost | 6; £1,200 per person-week | Available team and payroll rate |
| case.fixtures.fixedCost; contingency | £120,000; £12,000 | Launch cost components |
| case.fixtures.weeklyJobsPerStaff; weeklyDemand; feePerJob | 22; 140; £45 | Illustrative steady-state throughput and fees |
All evidence is fictional supplied input. Additional delay, alternative staffing, changed demand, linear productivity, sequential assurance stages and full-duration payroll are scenario choices or modelling interpretations. There are no supplier performance observations or uncertainty distributions in this question’s input.
What would make the target credible?
Establish the equipment delivery commitment at design completion, resource both hubs’ fit-out against the same shared equipment, and define acceptance evidence for integration, pilot and readiness. Monitor forecast completion of both parallel paths, then reforecast cost whenever the later path moves. The calculator cannot establish those commitments or certify safety; reaching week 12 here is a schedule result only.
Capacity is a steady-state illustration, not launch-week productivity. With six staff, 140 arrivals versus 132 completions would add eight jobs to backlog each week if all arrivals are accepted. A demand change alone does not justify compressing the assurance stages. Candidate responses are to cap intake, adjust service scope or evaluate an extra person; none is approved by this workspace.
Acceptance and observed checks
- Critical dependency and costs: the schedule table and longest-path explanation show the join after both fit-out and equipment; the reconciliation itemises fixed cost, full-programme payroll and contingency.
- At least two scenarios: four fixed reference cases remain visible alongside the selected scenario, so a changed input cannot erase the comparison.
- Author checks: independently recalculated six-person baseline, four-person case, delayed equipment, seven-person capacity, the eight-person budget breach and zero demand. Local JavaScript evaluation checked these results, invalid inputs and preset/reset state transitions. Browser interaction and visual review are performed separately by the run reviewer.
No probabilistic forecast, resource-levelled schedule, safety review, actual commitment or claim of improvement over another model is supplied. The page models combined two-hub totals; no hub split was provided. Uncertainty is exposed through scenarios, not a fabricated probability of success.