Creating and Planning Staff Schedules

Schedule24 Professional Edition offers business managers or team leaders an integrated workflow for creating, planning and publishing staff schedules. A familiar Microsoft Office interface means data entry is straightforward and works the same way as other standard office suite software.

There are two approaches to staff scheduling: structured and unstructured. Schedule24 Professional supports both styles. The more structured a staff schedule the higher level of automation can be achieved. Schedule24 Professional can support optimization models (where defined) for nine independent categories of scheduling information as follows:

Business requirement e.g. demand-led
Staff headcount
Staff work hours
Staff costs
Staff distribution by sub-group e.g. shift, job title, department and teams
Day-on-Day-off ratios
Shift durations e.g. continuous and split working
Shift juxtaposition e.g. DOR and SOR patterns
Staff preferences

Alternatively where optimization models have not been defined, or simply not preferred, Schedule24 Professional can balance the dependency effects across two or more categories. Schedule24 Professional schedule wizard automates structured staff schedules to specified parameters without the need for programming skills:

Automatically calculates required headcount
Defined shift times and descriptions
Shift pattern start day
Fixed or rotating schedule
Days-on-Days-off ratio and allocation pattern
Forward and backward days-off stagger
Shift staff distribution
Direction of schedule rotation (DOR)
Speed of schedule rotation (SOR)

When the scheduling parameters have been entered and options selected the following processes are automatically carried out:

Staff details are entered into the Personnel Manager
Staff are allocated shift patterns for viewing in the Team Manager
A completed staff schedule is displayed in a perpetual calendar
A shift pattern design is saved for further modification

Total control for customizing shift patterns for complex scheduling problems is carried out using the shift pattern designer. The schedule or shift pattern design environment supports more than thirty schedule design rules involving shift times, juxtaposition (pattern), days-off allocation, working hours, days of the week and number of days in rotation cycles.

A combination of the design wizard features and schedule editing tools in the design environment can be used. Shift designs contain the “rules”, or defined optimization model, for automating more complex staff schedules in a perpetual calendar.

Some staff may require less automation than others. The Team Manager provides the level of control for automation. Information about staff in the Personnel Manager is displayed alongside information about the shift designs selected to be used in the staff schedule. The Team Manager is “the bridge” between the Personnel Manager and shift designs.

Staff are allocated a shift design using drag and drop. When the Team Manager is closed all this information is combined and displayed in a perpetual calendar. Staff can also be de-allocated or moved to another shift design and the schedule automatically updates the information.