# Capacity planning in Connect Customer
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.
## Getting started
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. [Create capacity plans using forecasts and scenarios](capacity-planning-use-forecast.md)
1. [Create capacity planning scenarios](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)