Creating short-term schedules
The One-time Schedule (OTS) component is designed for teams with partially-fixed schedules or where staffing requirements change frequently. You can create an OTS to prepare a short-term schedule for a team. You then select the shifts, labor metrics, and employee assignments that will apply during the time period defined by the OTS.
This is the high-level process to create an OTS:
- Create an OTS for the team that you would like to schedule.
- Use the OTS edit screen to design the team schedule for the time period specified when creating the OTS. This is where you add shifts to the schedule, assign employees to shifts, and edit labor metrics.
- Process the OTS to put the schedule into use and publish it to other parts of the application.
After an OTS schedule is published, events such as education commitments, leaves of absence, or staff changes may require changes to the schedule. You can update a published OTS schedule to modify the shifts in the schedule, change employee assignments, or put employees on long-term absences (LTA). The OTS must be re-processed to put the schedule changes into use.
OTS templates can be used to make the scheduling process easier by reusing information between OTS schedules for the same team. Any OTS schedule that is not already based on an OTS template can be used to create an OTS template. At any point during the schedule creation process, you can create an OTS template from the shifts and labor metrics contained in the OTS schedule. The shifts and labor metrics become the reusable schedule rotation used to create future OTS schedules. Future OTS schedules created from the OTS template are pre-populated with this schedule rotation. The pre-populated schedule can be modified to meet the actual labor demand for the time period. This saves time when making schedules, as you do not have to start from scratch for each schedule period.