Most Qualified Employees

There are several criteria which affect how an employee is deemed most qualified for auto assignment purposes. In order to determine the most qualified employee, the system steps through each of the following criteria in turn, until the most qualified employee is determined for the unstaffed shift in question:

  1. Employee’s Team

    If an employee’s home or alternate team matches the team being auto-assigned into for the given time period, the employee is passed onto the next criteria check.

    For example, if you are auto assigning for Team A on Tue June 7, the employee should belong to Team A, home or alternate, on June 7 to satisfy this criteria.

    The USE_CHILD_TEAMS_EMPLOYEES parameter determines whether a team’s sub teams are included in this determination, which ensures that the auto-assigning process not only looks at employees for which the staffing requirements are defined, but also within child-teams.

  2. Employee’s Unassigned or Available Time

    Of the employees selected by team, their default shift (with unassigned job) or availability (as determined by the USE_AVAILABILITY parameter) is checked.

    If USE_AVAILABILITY is set to ‘Y’, the system checks to see if the employee’s availability matches the unstaffed time.

    If USE_AVAILABILITY is set to ‘N’, the system checks to see if the employee’s shift pattern matches the unstaffed time.

    If the USE_PARTIAL_SHIFT_BUMPING parameter is set to ‘Y’, the employee’s availability/shift pattern’s unassigned time can be a subset of the unstaffed shift time.

    If the USE_PARTIAL_SHIFT_BUMPING parameter is set to ‘N’, the employee’s availability/shift pattern’s unassigned time has to be equal to or greater than the unstaffed shift time.

    The auto-assigning process uses either employee availability or the employee's shift, but not both, within a single auto-assign check.

  3. Employee’s Job Qualifications

    Of the employees with matched time, their job qualifications are checked to determine if the employee is eligible to work.

  4. Employee’s Skill

    If the unstaffed shift has a skill requirement, the employee’s skill on the Employee Skill page is checked. Skills are date-sensitive, meaning that if the employee’s skill is expired (that is, the unstaffed shift date is either before the employee skill start date or after the employee skill end date) for the date the unstaffed shift belongs to, the employee would not qualify.

    An exception to this occurs if an employee’s required skill is set to expire, but it is assumed that the skill will be renewed before that time, even if it hasn’t yet been renewed at the time of scheduling. With this understanding, you would be unable to schedule such an employee into any shifts that occur after the skill expiry date, even though it is understood that by the time that schedule arrives the skill would have been renewed or extended.

    You can specify whether or not the expiry date is to be applied when an employee is being scheduled into a shift using the ALLOW_EMPLOYEE_FUTURE_SKILLS_EXPIRY parameter. If this is set to True, employees can be scheduled for dates beyond the expiry date of their skills and qualifications. MVS functions Swap, Save as New, Apply, Employee Find & Search, Find Other, Copy and Auto-Assign all validate against job qualification in this manner. When set to False, only Find & Search, Copy and Auto-Assign perform validation.

    For example, if a nurse’s license expires on January 15, and on December 1 the scheduler wants to schedule the nurse for the entire month of January, he will be able to successfully schedule the nurse for the whole month, even though the nurse’s license expires in the middle of the month. On January 15, the nurse must renew the license. If they do not, the scheduler will not be able to schedule them for any shifts beyond January 15 (and the shifts for which they are already scheduled beyond that date must be manually removed).

    Note: If the employee’s skill expires on the same day the scheduler is trying to schedule them for a shift that crosses midnight, the scheduler will not be able to complete the assignment regardless of the settings of the ALLOW_EMPLOYEE_FUTURE_SKILLS_EXPIRY parameter. For more information on MVS-specific registry parameters, see the Registry Parameter Reference Guide.

    For more information about skills and job qualifications, see the Time and Attendance Implementation and Administration Guide.

  5. Employee’s Job Rank

    Of the employees with qualified job and skill, their job rank as defined in the Rank field of the Employee Job sub-page is checked. The employee’s job rank determines the order in which employees fill an unstaffed shift. Rank 0 is the highest (most qualified) and rank 999 is the lowest (least qualified). If an employee doesn’t have a rank, they are considered the least qualified for a shift. If there are no ranked employees, then the system chooses the first employee that matched the criteria needed for the unstaffed shift.