Scheduling Features
Labor Forecasting & Schedule Optimization
New Activity Based Scheduling feature will provide the ability to filter and display staffing requirements by activity as well as by job and will support the tracking and association of multiple tasks for a given activity.
This will enable a manager to find employees to perform an activity based on skills they have for the activity/job/skill definition.
Users are now able to define and view tasks that are defined per activity.
Mid-week regeneration has been added to allow users to re-generate the forecast and workload due to updated sales data. The regenerated schedule will highlight areas where any changes in customer demand results in overstaffing or understaffing.
Managers can manually resolve overstaffed shifts. For understaffed shifts, the application will suggest additional shifts and possible staff members that can fill them.
Customers require that ability to schedule employees via fixed shifts in addition to standard variable-volume-driven shifts. In Workbrain 5, these fixed shifts count towards coverage of the volume driven workload.
New Schedule costing allows the cost of a planned schedule to be calculated based on actual employee pay rates and pay rule calculations. This new feature considers many factors to provide an extremely accurate schedule cost.
The schedule optimization model will be enhanced to minimize the total employee cost of the schedule. Minimizing employee costs will be an available preference when generating schedules.
Drivers will be separated from the location hierarchy. Rather than a forecast driver being subordinate to a specific schedule department, they will belong to the store. This will enable the reuse of a forecast driver across workload in many different departments, reducing the amount of configuration, data and processing required.
Staffing requirements will become effective dated. Dating staffing requirements can help account for equipment and process changes that occur throughout the year, especially when generating bottom up budgets. For example, rolling out a new cash register for the front end, on the west coast, will require changing the labor standard associated with that cashier work from the point of rollout to the rest of the year.
Store parameter-driven workload will be supported in order to accommodate certain types of workload that are fixed by store specific attributes. For example, sweeping workload may be proportional to floor area that varies from store to store. But this workload is not represented by a business volume driver because the workload does not vary from day to day or track customer patterns. Effective dating of this store type workload will be provided, in order to properly account for changing characteristics of the store.
An interval requirement callout framework will be implemented, which can allow custom code to be implemented for a particular customer that will effect change upon any workload requirement.
All modules, including schedule optimization, will now use a common set of schedule API’s. As well, when a schedule is created or modified, schedule overrides will be used, enabling a history of all changes that can be used for auditing and reporting purposes.
Shift Trading
Shift trading is now fully integrated with the schedule optimization product and employees’ skills will be verified before trades occur. In addition, a manager will now be able to view the most up-to-date schedule including all traded shifts. This will provide self- service functionality to employees, empowering them to trade their own shifts without manager intervention.
Schedule Compliance
The schedule optimization product will now use the schedule compliance module when validating schedule edits, thereby ensuring consistent schedule compliance across all areas of the system. Previously, a separate schedule validation module was used.
An administrator can set up schedule compliance rules to be warnings rather than just hard stops (errors). Warnings will notify the user that they are about to break a rule, but will not prevent the edit from occurring.
Leave Management
The time-off request has been enhanced to make an employee unavailable for scheduling for the time that they have requested off. Rather than merely taking an employee off a scheduled shift, this enhancement makes the employee unavailable and adjusts their accrual balance and pay appropriately.
Availability Management
New enhancements in availability management allow an employee to be booked off as absent or sick and immediately become unavailable. Once an employee is booked off, the search will not return any absent employees as available.
Multi-View Scheduler
A new, easy-to-use scheduling module has been introduced in Workbrain 5.0. The multi- view scheduler is designed to accommodate the needs of different industries, including healthcare and law enforcement.
The solution supports the management of employee schedules via a variety of configurable schedule views including a job requirement view, day part view, intra-day view, employee view, scheduled team view, and schedule period view, with real-time details of schedule coverage statistics. The solution also includes a new employee auto-assign capability that automatically fills shifts based on employee skill, team and job priority for all unstaffed shifts. Users can use multiple filtering and sort capabilities to better analyze and understand their current and future scheduling situations.
Skills and Training
New enhancements have been made to bridge the qualifications table with the skills and training module, as follows:
- Updates in the skills and training module will automatically be reflected in the employee qualifications table.
- Any update to the skills and training module, such as an employee completing the required skills to perform a job, will automatically list that job with that employee in the qualifications table.
- The skills and training module will also provide a notification to employees and/or their supervisors to let them know when a certification will expire.