Top Performer Scheduling

The preference to “Schedule higher skilled employees in preferred times” is referred to as Top Performer Scheduling. This rule allows the schedule optimizer to strongly prefer to schedule employees for shifts that cover peak times. Several parameters are available to configure the behavior of this feature.

Top Performers are determined by the skill weight (level) as set under Maintenance > Employees > Employee > Employee Skills.

The population of employees with a given job and skill combination to cover a staff requirement are divided into two groups: Top Performers and others. The Top Performer Split indicates the percentage of qualified employees that will be considered to be top performers. By default, this parameter is set to 0.25, considering the top 25% as Top Performers. These employees will be preferred over all the other employees for shifts covering peak times.

The system then needs to find the peaks. Each staff requirement has a peak time source to indicate which driver will be used to determine the peak times. This driver is used along with the configured distributions for that driver to spread the forecasted volumes across each time interval. The total forecasted volume for the week is multiplied by the peak threshold to come up with the expected peak volume. For each peak window, the total volume is compared to that threshold to determine whether the window is a peak.

If adjacent peak periods are identified, they are combined into one larger peak. After all the peak times for the week are identified, the number that is used in the optimization process is limited by the max peak windows configuration in the staff requirement. The peaks with the higher volumes will be considered. Lower volume peaks will be discarded if the maximum number of peak times is reached.

These registry parameters are used for Top Performer Scheduling:

  • PEAK_THRESHOLD
  • PEAK_WINDOW_LENGTH
  • SHIFT_PEAK_COVERAGE
  • TOP_PERFORMER_SPLIT

See the "LFSO Registry Parameters" chapter in the Infor Workforce Management Registry Parameter Reference Guide.