Bid groups

Bid groups are a collection of employees who are bidding on the same set of shifts or shift patterns. After you create a bid group, you assign teams and employees to the group. The employees within the bid group are the only ones eligible to bid for the shifts or shift patterns assigned to that group.

When adding teams to a bid group, you can fine-tune eligibility without changing underlying team structures:

  • Manual Exclusions: You can specify individual employees to exclude from the bid group. Excluded employees are omitted from the eligible bidder list before bidding begins.
  • Exclusion Filter Extension Script: You can attach an exclusion filter extension script to dynamically evaluate and filter eligible employees based on specific business rules, certifications, or criteria at runtime.

The order in which employees are awarded shifts or shift patterns is determined by configured sort and tie-breaker rules or a custom Sort Extension Script. During bid processing:

  1. Team members are identified.
  2. Manually excluded employees are removed.
  3. The custom filter script, if configured, filters the remaining candidates.
  4. The remaining eligible employees are sorted to establish bidding precedence.

You can specify a bid group to use preferences, which let employees define their schedule preferences. If an employee does not bid or does not bid on enough shifts, the shift pattern assignments are calculated based on the employee’s pre-defined preferences.