Intellicate Workforce Solutions

Proactive Workforce Management with Schedule24 Professional

Schedule24 Professional is a powerful workforce management solution designed to help business and resource managers target their workforce effectively to improve business profitability. It delivers the workflow to manage the complexities of extended and 24 hour working and enables more efficient team coordination in today's competitive markets. It achieves this by giving you greater control over workforce planning, whilst ensuring staff well being and reducing your exposure to risk from complex working hour’s legislation.

How does this help? Schedule24 Professional transforms a reactive, cost-cutting management that only has power to say no, into a proactive cost-benefit management capable of maximizing and realizing potential. Managers that can handle the complexity of multiple working strategies will be more flexible and responsive. Managers that have immediate access to feedback on the impact of staff costs will make better decisions and offer consistent performance. Managers that are able to reduce risk will be more confident.

Everything You Need

Schedule24 Professional integrates many of the processes scattered throughout the business into one smooth workflow, including the following. Local solutions can be effortlessly published to the web, for universal access; a comprehensive staff manager maintains all your staff information in one place for immediate access; variable cost calculations are carried out automatically for immediate feedback; the shift pattern design environment enables multiple shift patterns to be combined and managed in one schedule; powerful monitoring and analysis tools provide up to date information on staff scheduling strategy; automatic auditing reduces compliance risks and eliminates expensive staff re-scheduling errors; web and email publishing ensures fast communication; over 30 business reports can generate management information in seconds

Why an Integrated Workflow is Important

Most of us at some time have used a spreadsheet or a whiteboard to organize and schedule staff. We often continue to use these methods because they are convenient and accessible, and not because they work well. The factors involved in deploying an effective and efficient workforce are complex. Solutions that appear simple often have unforeseen consequences. Working arrangements are kept simple so that they can be managed, not because they are the best arrangements.. Simply scheduling staff whilst maintaining a basic record of "no-shows" or absence for around 40 staff can be a full-time job.

Schedule24 Professional will typically generate an immediate cost-benefit in the order of around 30%. Longer range planning is so much easier and conflicts can be identified and resolved much earlier. Another benefit of Schedule24 Professional is the ability to immediately assess the impact of staff costs. Traditionally these are rarely considered outside of HR or Payroll processes and then usually in the context of some post-event cost-cutting exercise. When cost feedback is available before or during operational decisions then the benefits are immediate.

For many auditing is a somewhat inquisitorial process that will justify the "hope we've been doing it right" system. With Schedule24 Professional a wide range of conflicts or issues are automatically checked and validated including staff availability, working hours, rest periods and thresholds that ensure staff well being. Risk from workforce and labor disputes is significantly reduced if not eliminated.

Communication is essential for a well coordinated workforce. A workflow avoids staff deployment strategies being perceived as arbitrary and encourages an ordered and responsible approach by employer and employee alike. The whole process becomes an integral part of business management associated with company goals and therefore treated with peer respect.

The Signals That You Need Schedule24 Professional

The relationship between staff headcount, working hours and staff costs have a direct impact on business profitability and the capacity to deliver valued services. They are also complex, fraught with unforeseen consequences of the quick fix, and largely neglected until confrontation stimulates a reaction. The most common manifestation of issues include:

• Managers do not know the impact staff costs have on the business.
• Staff continuity breaks down and production falls or target deadlines are missed.
• Scheduling is viewed as an HR or IT process, and not an operations outcome.
• The use of manual or spreadsheet methods that are difficult to track and quantify.
• The creation of exclusion zones around group working arrangements.
• Frequent ad hoc shift changes affecting staff well being.
• Protracted timelines and budget overruns.
• The convergence of staff costs and revenue generation.
• Talk of wage-hour and other labor law violations.

Many customers discover Schedule24 Professional lies at the heart of everything they do. It becomes mission critical to how they run the business and part of a routine.

Be Wary of "Bolt-on" Solutions

We know many of our customers have tried other approaches and solutions before "discovering" us. What is often surprising is the investment in time and energy, to say nothing of the cost, in implementing variants in Microsoft Excel and Lotus Notes. It appears particularly attractive when businesses have invested in an HR, Time and Attendance or Payroll system and "staff rostering" is offered as an optional extra, sometimes at no additional cost. It is then discovered that the overhead involved in making customizations is too high.

Most HR and other record-based retrieval systems (which perform well in the capacity for which they were designed), suffer badly when it comes to managing staff scheduling solutions. The algorithms required for managing time based slots in the context of multiple shift patterns are simply beyond the capabilities of these systems. In many cases project costs have already greatly exceeded the eventual expenditure of deploying Schedule24 Professional.

Schedule24 Professional has been designed by people who understand that operational outcome is just as important as process. In truth we believe it is more important. We have been operations managers ourselves in both the public and private sector, and continue to work closely with the development team and technical leads to ensure that operational focus is maintained.

Intellicate Workforce Management Solutions

Traditionally workforce management solutions have been supplied as part of large integrated systems that only corporate budgets can afford. Changes in workforce legislation and labor trends have had a huge impact on business - whatever the size. Even large corporations look hard at the costs of implementing large systems.

As corporations accelerate their strategy for devolved business units, Schedule24 Professional is a perfect fit to bring enterprise class features which generate cost benefit savings in the first month.

We have made sure that the Schedule24 workforce solution can be deployed locally or strategically on normal office computers without the need for specialist IT support. Whether you are running a retail store with 15 staff, or managing freight operation in the busiest shipping lane in the world, Schedule24 workforce solutions has been the product of choice for operations managers.

Functionality that Delivers the Power to Change

Much research in recent times has highlighted the concern that employers are becoming increasingly detached from their business. At the center of much of this research are employer-staff relations in its various guises. The most important aspect Schedule24 Professional has to offer is the power to reconnect and make a difference:

• Power to have a say about how your workforce is deployed.
• Power to deliver flexible working that meets business change.
• Power to reduce exposure to risk
• Power to enable others to deliver the business goals
• Power to communicate and coordinate teams

All We Ask You to Risk is 30 minutes

Which is about as long it will take for you to decide to take a closer look during a personalized online demonstration of Schedule24? We have deployed our solution to all sizes of business, and we can deliver for your business - however small. Contact us now and we will arrange a no obligation demonstration of the Schedule24 Professional solution at a time to suit you.

Call (617) 379 2709 (US) - (20) 8906 6793 (UK).