Schedule to Budget rule
The Schedule to Budget
rule is used to create
schedules that spend the entire budget. When this rule is selected, the total hours in the
staff requirements are compared with the location budget. The staff requirements are increased
or decreased to match the budget. The staff requirement adjustment process is known as Budget
Adjusted Workload. Shifts are assigned in the schedule to cover the adjusted staff
requirements with the goal of spending the entire budget.
For example on a given week, the forecast for a store calls for 80 staff
hours, and the store's budget is 120 hours. Without the Schedule to
Budget
rule, shifts would be assigned to cover the 80 hours required by the
forecast. With the Schedule to Budget
rule enabled, staff
requirements would be increased to 120 hours. Assuming enough employees are available, the
optimizer would assign 120 hours, or more, of shifts to cover the adjusted staff requirements.
Adjustments to staff requirements are done within the maximum and minimum staff levels configured for a location. Staff requirements cannot be increased beyond the maximum staff requirements when the budget is large. Similarly, staff requirements cannot be reduced below the minimum staff requirements. Changes in staff requirements are distributed proportionately across the schedule period.
Schedule to Budget
creates schedules where
the schedule cost equals or exceeds the budget amount. When this rule is used with the Maximum Schedule Budget
rule configured as a hard constraint,
schedules are ruled out if the schedule cost is above the budget amount. When Schedule
to Budget
is set as a hard constraint, schedule creation fails if the entire budget
amount cannot be spent due to the configuration of other rules or lack of available employees.
Supported budget types
Schedule to Budget
rule supports these
budget types:- Hours
- FTEs
- Dept External Sources
- Department External Sources Hours
- Store Labor Budgeting
- Store External Sources Hours
A callout class must be specified in the
SO_BUDGET_ADJUSTED_WORKLOAD_CALLOUT_CLASS registry parameter to use the Schedule to
Budget
rule with budgets in dollar amounts. This callout class returns an average
hourly rate that is used to convert the location budget into hours for the purpose of
adjusting the staff requirements.