# Capacity planning in Connect Customer
<a name="capacity-planning"></a>

A capacity plan helps you estimate the long-term FTE (full-time equivalent) requirements for your contact center, up to 64 weeks in the future. It specifies how many FTE agents are required to meet the service level target for a certain period of time. 

After you generate long-term FTE estimations, you can share this information with other stakeholders, such as Human Resources, Finance, and the Training Department, to help help the hiring and training of staff. When a business launches a new product or extends into a new Region, staff hiring is needed to meet the customer service demand.

Capacity planning uses published long-term and short-term forecasts as inputs, along with scenario information that you provide. It then creates a long-term capacity plan that you can share with stakeholders. When generating a capacity plan, an overlap of at least 4 weeks between short-term and long-term forecasts is recommended to identify contact patterns correctly within a day. At a minimum, an overlap of at least one day is required.

The following diagram illustrates this integration among published long-term forecasts, capacity planning, and capacity planning output.

![The integration among published long-term forecasts, capacity planning inputs, and capacity planning output.](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/wfm-capacity-planning-diagram.png)


## Getting started
<a name="getting-started-capacity-planning"></a>

Following is the order of steps for creating a capacity plan and sharing it with others.

1. [Create capacity planning scenarios](capacity-planning-create-scenarios.md)

1. [Import estimated future shrinkage and available full-time employees in Connect Customer](upload-estimated-future-shrinkage.md): This is an optional step but it can improve the accuracy of your capacity plan.

1. [Manage starting backlog projections](capacity-planning-backlog-projections.md): If you use an average time to complete target for the Task or Email channels, Connect Customer automatically generates starting backlog projections for capacity planning to use. You can review or override these projections.

1. [Create capacity plans using forecasts and scenarios](capacity-planning-use-forecast.md)

1. [Review capacity plan output](capacity-planning-review-output.md)

1. [Review](capacity-planning-review-output.md), [override](override-capacity-plan.md), [re-run](rerun-capacity-plan.md), or [download](download-capacity-plan.md) a capacity plan. 

1. [Publish a capacity plan](publish-capacity-plan.md)