Schedule templates

Schedule templates are how you plan the workload requirements and shifts for each team. Schedule templates are required by Auto-Assignment to define coverage needs and the pool of shifts that can be assigned to create the schedule.

Workload requirements generated from Staffing Requirement Templates (SRTs) are used by Auto-Assignment to determine the coverage needs of each team. Shift Templates (STs) are a rotation of shifts that can be generated for a team. Typically, one or more STs are selected when creating an Auto-Assignment process. Auto-Assignment assigns the shifts contained in the STs based on the schedule rules and other parameters of the Auto-Assignment group.

It may not be possible to assign all the shifts in an Auto-Assignment run due to a lack of available employees or other reasons. An ST can be configured to remove the remaining shifts from the schedule or keep them as unassigned shifts, so they can be filled manually.

Schedule templates should be configured according to the staffing needs of the client's organization. Care should be taken when designing STs, as the number or definitions of shifts in an ST can be incompatible with hard constraints set in the schedule rules. For example, an ST may not have enough shifts to satisfy the minimum number of hours for all the employees being scheduled. In this case, Auto-Assignment would not assign any shifts because there are no feasible solutions to create the schedule.