Category Archives: 1-Introduction

Choosing Tools

· · Leave a comment

Depending on the size of your business and the distribution of your operations, you may find that it’s time to support your planners and start shopping for tools.

 

A scheduling tool is more than a scheduling tool; it is an operations management tool for your workforce. You therefore need to keep that perspective when listening to software vendors.

 

There are a lot of do’s and don’ts when comes the time to shop for software. Especially, take the time to listen to the vendors so that you can understand their perspective and their design. Let them make the link between your operations and their tool. Your first disconnect will be vocabulary: the terms used in a software are not the ones you use in your company. It will therefore be difficult for your users to follow what a vendor is saying.

 

Future entries will give you simple guidelines to follow so that you can make the best choice for your business.

 

Strategy becomes input

· · Leave a comment

When a business is small and gets settled into their way of operating, some strategic decisions are made to make sure these operations run smoothly at the lowest cost possible.

 

As a business grows, some of these strategies need to be challenged to make sure they still fit with the changed operations. Change being the only constant, you can bet that some of the strategies established a few years ago don’t apply or could be changed for cheaper and better ways.

 

Strategy is always an input and a constraint to what a planner does. The planner, although sometimes full of new ideas, does not necessarily have access to the management level who makes these strategic decisions. Therefore, the strategic guidelines may become at some point in time an obstacle which may cause higher cost later down the road.

 

For example, a policy for stand-by duty was established 20 years ago. Stand-by premiums make sure someone is next to a phone available to come in to work at very short notice. This allows the planner to know who to call as soon as someone calls in sick for example. Everyone is set in their ways and the cost associated to stand-by duty is built in the total cost of the workforce.

 

But in today’s technology and with most people having cell phones, is stand-by still a good idea? The planner can reach all the employees that are not at work with a quick text message to all and the first one to answer gets an extra shift. Is there any need for stand-by anymore? Maybe, maybe not. Some factual data is required and needs to be analyzed for the business, but my point is that it’s easy to stay set in certain ways of operating and it’s important to both keep on open mind for new ideas but also to stay calm in front of new possibilities. Too many companies get excited about a new great software or a new great idea and commit the whole company to it prior to making a complete analysis on the impact it has on daily operations. The devil is often in the details and it always takes time to get to that level: how many hours is a full-time employee? How many hours in a day before paying overtime? What’s the minimum rest for employees? Should we hire on specific hours of work or should all employees work any shift? Should we pay premiums for tough tasks? All these details will have more impact on your bottom line than any new technology. And although these details seem tactical, they are actually very strategic since each answer will drive the employee’s perspective of the company.

 

Management is keen on numbers and proof of what a planner knows in their gut and sees happen all day long. The key point is to educate higher management by translating daily events into factual data that will have an immediate impact on strategic guidelines established by folks in key positions.

 

Maintaining the schedule

· · Leave a comment

Don’t be afraid to change the plan

As mentioned in a previous entry, a schedule is simply a plan for the future and until it happens, it can change. Those of you with experience in planning will know that as soon as you communicate the schedule to someone, some event will happen to make that schedule invalid and force changes.

 

Any one of these events will cause a schedule to change and force the planner to redo one or more of the previous steps:

  1. A change in workload (big customer takes priority with a last minute request, last minute sale causes customer traffic increase, etc)
  2. A change in employee information (an employee forgot to give the planner unavailability, employee has just quit, HR just told you about a new employee starting, etc)
  3. A change of context (machine just broke down, snow storm is coming tomorrow, etc)
  4. Etc

 

There are hundreds if not thousands of examples where a new piece of information causes a planner to redo the schedule on an on-going basis basically making it a full time job.

 

The problem here is that once the schedule is posted and communicated, the planner can’t change the whole schedule. Employees now have shifts on which they base their own decisions about their lives. A planner can’t just come in and start from scratch. That published schedule now becomes a constraint and must endure as little changes as possible while answering the change of business.

 

It is in this step that most last minute decisions cause additional costs. A planner with no tool or no guidelines will make the decision that will make the immediate problem go away with little regards to the final cost.

Distributing Shifts

· · Leave a comment

You’ve got shifts and now you need to assign them.

 

Different measures may influence the way you place shifts:

  1. Fairness: do you distribute weekend or night shifts fairly
  2. Shift count: do all weekdays have the same amount of shifts
  3. Constraints: do you have complex constraints to look at

 

The first thing to do is to identify the days with the most shifts to assign. The planner will need to start with these days since they are the days where most people are needed (and the days that in theory, the planner kept the most capacity).

 

While placing these shifts, the planner will start with the shifts that will be measured for fairness and that need to be distributed fairly. Usually, counters are kept on fairness to determine who’s next to get the bad shift (or the good shift depending on what you measure).

 

The constraints are looked at when you get to assign the other days (usually the ones surrounding the busiest days and working outwards). You would then complete your schedule finishing with the day that has the lowest number of shifts to assign.

 

To make this step easy, the planner must be prepared with measures and counters. The more prepared the planner and the better the previous three steps are accomplished, the easier this step will be.

 

Planning the non-work

· · Leave a comment

Non-work is one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle

 

Each position represents a pre-determined capacity of work. Once that position is filled with an employee, that capacity is reduced by the constraints they have (vacation, breaks, etc).

 

Therefore, a planner must schedule the non-work first and remove the work capacity first before trying to assign the work. Although this seems to be in reverse order of what someone should do, it is essential to start with this step. Training, vacation, holidays, meetings and all other types of events that do not contribute to the core workload need to be scheduled first.

 

While placing this reduction of capacity, the planner can keep an eye on just that: the remaining capacity. On every day of every week, there is a potential of work assignments that remain and that are not removed. If the planner can keep daily and weekly capacity totals above the required workload, then the planner may have an easier job when distributing the actual work afterwards (I did say may since the individual constraints could prevent some shift assignments).

 

It is in this step that you must involve the employees as often and as transparently as possible. You need to gather the information about time off early and often. You need to establish deadlines (reasonable ones) for the employees to make their requests. You need to remind them often of the upcoming deadlines. Etc.

 

If you don’t involve your employees or don’t ask, they will only ask once they see the schedule and see that you scheduled them on a day they wanted off. Then the planner won’t be able to give them the day off. Then the employee will be pissed because they never ask for anything and never miss work and that’s how they are treated. Then when that day comes, that employee will call in sick. Then the planner will have to make a hasty decision and call someone on overtime. All this because you didn’t ask early enough…

 

The point in this step is that non-work is one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle because everyone is concerned about unproductive time (management because of the cost, employees because it’s their time off, etc). Keeping an eye on capacity early and often is key.

 

Calculating Positions

· · Leave a comment

In our case, a position refers to the hiring of one employee with specific constraints. For example, someone is hired to be cashier on a full time basis. Therefore, a schedule will be built using multiple positions (each with the same or different constraints). Positions are also referred to as a line or a row in a schedule. Each position will accept one or more shifts on different days in order for that position to be handed off to an employee.

 

That position also has a maximum capacity of work each day and each week. That position is also entitled to time off and sickness which reduces the capacity of the position. Absenteeism and rest can make an employee work only 75% of the time (depending on the number of vacation days, culture, break times, training, etc).

 

This means that even though you would have 40 hours of shifts to give every week, one employee is not sufficient. The number of positions you need are based on many factors:

  1. The number of shifts and their total durations: calculate the number of positions on the sum of shifts and not the workload
  2. The daily variation of shifts: There may be a different number of shifts required on each day for different positions
  3. The seasonal variation of workload: vacation resorts are exposed to seasonal demand where the number of positions will vary greatly during the year
  4. The demographics around your place of business: The people that surround you place of business make the pool of potential employees. If you are surrounded by students, don’t open full time Monday to Friday jobs or at least minimize them.

 

Calculating positions is sometimes seen as a chicken or egg story[1]: should you create a schedule first and adjust the positions based on the schedule results, or should you estimate your positions and use them as a constraint on your schedule?

 

There are ways to calculate the positions you would require best to match your workload but they do ignore what you already have as employees. The important point in this step is that you must use the shifts that were built in step one and not use the sum of the workload as approximate numbers. The workload profile may come back to haunt you later down the road.

 


[1] Author’s irrelevant note: the chicken or egg story has been sorted out by Professor John Brookfield from the University of Nottingham who discovered that any animal’s DNA does not change during its lifetime which means that the egg had to come first with the DNA of the chicken.

 

Breaking down the work

· · Leave a comment

Once the workload is established and quantified, a planner will break it down into shifts that have start and end times. These start and end times are based on the constraints also identified earlier.

The constraints will force the planner to do some math gymnastics to get to shifts that make sense for the employees and that cover the workload appropriately. The important item to remember in this step is that even though the planner is trying to match the number of hours of work with the sum of shift durations, they most probably won’t match.

 

Depending on the profile of the workload, it may not be possible to service a peak of customers just for two hours. If the planner has to deal with a constraint of a minimum shift of 4 hours in duration, then the total number of hours in the shifts will exceed the workload to cover this peak.

 

Therefore, the next steps should be planned using the hours in the shifts and not necessarily the hours in the workload only.

 

It is also important to remember all the different skills that are required to run a business. A planner will typically have to create a set of shifts for each of these skills (unless they can be combined to be worked by the same person). This also adds more hours to the total that is used for deciding what to hire.

 

 

The Constraints

· · Leave a comment

By definition, a schedule is laid out through time because of constraints.

 

Most constraints are time-based. Things take time to do and as we all know, time moves on no matter what. Time imposes constraints on the duration work requires, on the moment that work should be done, and finally on the person that will do the work since that person needs to be there and be available in order for the work to be done.

 

There are constraints related to the sequence of the work to be done. Sometimes, things need to be done in a certain order. I mentioned earlier that you can change a plan at any time until it’s actually happened. Well of course, there are different obstacles to changing a plan at the last minute. You can’t open the door on the highway and say « OK, I’m getting off » if you’re still at full speed. You’ll have to announce yourself, so that the steps for you to get off can be taken in the right order (like pulling over…).

 

The most widely known constraints are the ones concerning employees. An employee can only work so many hours in a day or in a week; an employee needs to rest; needs breaks; needs vacation; etc. These constraints are usually explained in an employee handbook or in a union agreement. The problem usually lies in the interpretation of these constraints as they are written with the perspective of human resources. They are not formulated for a planner in charge of applying them.

 

A strategic constraint negotiated at the company level may be difficult to apply at the schedule level. For example, if the company adopts a car pooling policy to reduce tardiness on the job, that’s great at an executive level and seems like it works for all employees. But if you have a department where employees share different shift start times, this policy imposes additional constraints to the planner. That planner now needs to schedule the same shifts to people who live close together so they can take advantage of car pooling as the policy now says. You can imagine the additional headaches for that planner to accommodate everyone while making sure the business operates efficiently. Some of my future entries will detail the constraints planners have to deal with and how to best express them.

 

The Employee

· · Leave a comment

The single most difficult element of a schedule is the employee.

 

Why? An employee is a human being with his own life, his own goals, and his own projects. That employee has plans for their life and they are changing.

 

For an employee, that schedule you create is their life. That person will have to plan all their personal activities and family obligations around it and that person will try to get the best schedule possible for their own benefit. As people grow older, the benefits will change over the years. What was a good thing for that employee last year (lots of overtime) may not be good this year because that person just entered parenthood. This means that just like the workload changes, your employee preferences will also evolve.

 

Employees want to be treated fairly. Folks who get hired into a job that has varying schedules know what to expect, but they also want to make sure the bad schedules (the weekend night shift for example) doesn’t always fall on them.

 

The schedule is known to be one of the key elements that cause turnover. Anyone in Human Resources would tell you what the cost of turnover is and the importance it has. I won’t make that point here, but I will state that for employees who are scheduled, they will change jobs in a heartbeat for a better schedule simply because it means a better life.

 

You need to establish expectations for the workforce. The clearer they are, the easier your life will be. Don’t put reality on a positive spin or a negative spin: tell the story as clearly as you can to your employees. Otherwise, any gray area will be made up by people. Nature does not like holes and fills them up quickly. Therefore, any hole you leave in your story will be left for people to fill with whatever is good for them (an optimistic person will fill it with happy thoughts and the pessimistic will see a plot to squeeze all the employees and abuse their good will to the bone).

 

Any HR specialist has a whole bunch of directives to give planners and management and what to say and what not to say to employees. In the end, it’s all about humans and future entries will examine more aspects around the employees and the points to look at when scheduling is concerned.

The Workload

· · Leave a comment

The work to be accomplished represents the cornerstone of scheduling.

 

This work represents the business of any organization and it is crucial to translate that business into actionable work with the appropriate duration.

 

All businesses have a product and/or service that they provide their customers. Products take time to build and services take time to provide. If you are a car manufacturer, you don’t simply schedule people and tell each of them to build a car. That car is broken down into thousands of processes and assembly line tasks. Each task takes a certain amount of time and these tasks are synchronized so that cars get assembled at a certain pace or cadence.

 

The same thing goes for a retail store. A certain amount of customers is expected and people are required to service these customers. There will be a direct relationship between the amount of sales or customers and the employees that will support these sales.

 

The workload is the result of the translation of the business products into manageable, measurable, and assignable activities and tasks. Future text will detail how to translate your business into a workload that makes sense.

 

One thing to remember about the workload is that it evolves and changes just as your business grows. Therefore, even though you did a great job of quantifying your workload last year, you probably need to do it again this year. A mistake done at the quantifying stage of the workload has a domino and an amplifying effect on your operations costs later down the road.