Expected geolocations

A clock's expected geolocation is defined based on the geofence of the team to which the employee is scheduled at the time of the clock. A geofence consists of the team's GPS coordinates and a radius around those coordinates. For example, if an employee is scheduled on team A from 09:00 to 17:00, then their clock's expected geolocation at 9:12 is within the zone defined for team A.

Note: Workforce Management does not include any GIS services of its own. Geofencing uses the GPS coordinates that are received from the mobile device.

As a WFM administrator, you can expand the scheduled time by specifying a grace period using the GEO_VALIDATION_GRACE registry parameter. For example, if an employee is scheduled on team A from 09:00 to 17:00 and the grace period is set to 5 minutes, the system will consider the employee's expected location to be team A from 08:55 to 17:05. With this configuration, if the employee clocks within the team A zone at 08:57, the clock will be recorded though the employee is not scheduled at any location at that exact time. If the employee clocks at 08:52, the clock will not be recorded, regardless of the coordinates associated with the clock.

In situations where an employee is scheduled to work on two different teams with no gap between the times, the employee will have multiple concurrent expected locations for the overlapping time.

In this example, an employee is scheduled on store A from 09:00 to 13:00 and store B from 13:00 to 17:00 and a 5 minute grace period has been defined. During the period from 12:55 to 13:05, the employee is expected to be at either location. If a clock occurs within that overlapping time and the employee is within either zone, the clock will be recorded.

This diagram shows the expected locations of an employee assigned to two different stores during the day.

If the employee is not expected anywhere (for example, before 8:55 or after 17:05 in the preceding diagram), then the system will prevent the employee from recording a clock during that "nowhere" time.

If an employee is scheduled on a team that has opted out of the geolocation clocking, the system will consider all coordinates (or lack of coordinates) to be within the employee's expected location for the duration of their expected time within that team's location. In other words, if the team has opted out, the location of the employee's clock is not relevant. The system will, however, prevent employees from clocking outside of their expected time (scheduled time plus grace period) as described above.