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Here's how these features are used to build a schedule: Open a Worksheet and set the date range to whatever period you want to work on. Load whatever group or groups of employees you want to schedule for that period. Open the scheduler's Toolbox. Any prior entries you or anyone else has made will be displayed. Make any additional irregularly occurring entries, (vacations, special assignments, day off requests, etc). Click on the FILL icon and the preferred normal schedule for everyone who has one will be intelligently filled in around the prescheduled entries. Every employee will be scheduled for the amount of hours their contract guarantees, on their preferred days and their primary job assignments. Coverage Monitor shows at a glance which assignments are short, which have cushions and which have unallowed excess people assigned. Coverage Statistics shows you the dates and times the shorts and excesses occur. Eliminate the shorts and excesses by making changes manually, or use the Coverage Wizard. As you make changes the coverage monitor updates. The automatic Rule Checking function warns you should you violate any individual's contract work rules or scheduling restrictions. |
FILL
FUNCTION
- One click
lays down a draft (default) schedule for one or any number of employees.
This gets all your people on the schedule and gives you a minimum labor
cost base starting point to work from. You then complete the
schedule by making changes manually or using LEVELING WIZARD to obtain
100% coverage of all assignments.
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 RULE
CHECKING
- As
entries are made or edited on the schedule they are instantly checked
against all contract imposed work rules. Violations are indicated as
they occur. The scheduler may or may not have the option of allowing
the violation depending how your system administrator has set up the
contracts.
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 COVERAGE
MONITOR
- (right figure) is a very concise display of
the status of scheduled coverage levels of all assignments for which coverage
requirements have been defined. It shows shorts, disallowed excesses
and / or cushions (allowed excesses) over the range of the schedule currently loaded for view.
You specify required coverage levels on the Assignment Definition Form
(below) when you set up your application. Schedule Builder then
constantly compares them with the schedule and updates Coverage Monitor to
show you the current coverage status. Options on the Assignment Definition Form allow you to vary default coverage levels at every shift change and on every day of the week. If you really want to set up your application to model real world needs, you have the capability to specify different types of coverage for different times. In the figure at left the Unit Coordinator assignment is to be covered exclusively during the day and evening shifts, 8:00a to midnight for this application. From midnight to 8:00a the required coverage is to have someone available in the group with the necessary qualifications, but that person will be designated as covering another assignment concurrently. This degree of detail in coverage definition is only necessary if you intend to set up automated leveling schemes or have very critical coverage requirements. Typically you will want to invest in a little setup assistance at least to get started if you decide to develop your application to this degree.
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 COVERAGE
STATISTICS
- This
screen provides a minute by minute look at where shorts or excesses are
occurring on any assignment for every date on the schedule you currently
have loaded for view.Use the pop up window to select a specific assignment or a summary view of all assignments. Select the statistic to display, the units and a time period breakdown. As you make your selections the appropriate number of header rows will appear at the top of the worksheet where the statistic will display. In the figure you see there is a cushion of one person assigned as Senior Tech Unit 2 on Monday the 13th from 7:00a to 3:00p. FTEs are units of full time equivalents. If the cushion existed for only four hours it would display as 0.5 instead of 1.
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 COVERAGE
WIZARD finds ways to
cover assignment shorts. It evaluates virtually all possible
schedule changes which might be made to cover a short assignment within
the constraints imposed and preferences set at the time.
The wizard offers five modes of operation.
All our demo applications include a fully developed "Scheme" and instruction on how you can run them to see exactly how powerful this capability can be when properly developed. The automated schedule building capabilities of Schedule Builder are unmatched in any other scheduling software product of which we are aware.
The process of developing a Schedule Builder application to take advantage of the software's automated leveling capabilities can be arduous, and usually requires at least some assistance from our support personnel. Before you begin automating the process you have to have your coverage requirements accurately defined and be able to manually produce schedules that satisfy your needs. Then you design a scheme based on the approach you used manually. From then on you can use the scheme to do in a minute what took hours to do manually, and it will do a better job because it considers virtually all the possibilities. The two figures above show the forms used to develop Schemes. The smaller figure defines "passes", the larger defines constraints to be imposed during passes. Usually the first thing you do manually is run the FILL function to create a draft schedule, so you define the 1st Leveling Pass in your scheme to do that. If as in the figure above the next thing you normally do is fill all the shorts in a certain assignment using Day Off changes, that becomes the first step in Leveling Pass #2. In the figure above from our OB Unit demo the Unit Clerk (UC) assignment is filled first in that way. If shorts remain after all day off changes have been made, same day shift changes are used, then day off and shift changes. Finally, if UC shorts still exist extra help is brought in. That is done on a third leveling pass because the designer of the scheme needed to set different constraints to impose. Schemes can consist of up to 64 passes and use up to 64 different sets of constraints, but typically a dozen or less of each will do the job. |
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SQL Compliant Database simplifies export of schedule data Share cross qualified employees among up to 31 groups Individual unit, centralized or combined schedule creation Employee self scheduling options Census driven coverage requirement options Publishing controls and facility wide schedule viewing with no per machine license cost Budget compliance and monitoring options Contract specified allowance tracking Public and private note posting features Extensive markup and report formatting capabilities Do it yourself, assisted setup and turnkey options Designated assignment and skill available requirement types No mandatory support contracts, both email and telephone support at very affordable hourly rates |
