Schedonomy® Science

The carving will all depend on the profile and the type of workload. For time-dependant workload, a planner needs to transform the requirements curve into blocks of work. Best way to proceed is to view the work as a matrix of work versus a workload. The horizontal axis is time and each column represents the resolution of workload breakdown you decided upon in chapter 3 (remember?).

Let’s look at the grid below. The grid has a one-hour resolution (the workload resolution). The required workload for a specific activity is indicated just below. Right under the workload is the coverage. The coverage represents the number of employees present and productive for that activity. In our grid, at this point in the process, it represents the number of shifts covering the hour. Each row under that represents one shift.

In this example, the workload is small to make it simple to explain. You’ll notice that it is very easy to reproduce this example in a spreadsheet tool. Makes things easier to try out and modify the shifts (making them longer, shorter, etc). We’ll also consider that the longest possible shift is 8 hours. Anything over 8 hours is overtime and shouldn’t necessarily be part of this step.

First thing to do is to determine the first shift start time; in our example, we start at 6am when the workload starts. We then pencil in the number 1 in each cell that the shift will cover. When you pencil in a 1, you need to add 1 to the coverage row since you just added a shift. Lets pencil in the shift for 8 hours.

Moving right along, we notice the workload going up again at 9a and again at 10a. Therefore, we can pencil in shift 2 starting at 9a and shift 3 starting at 10a for a duration of 8 hours.

We now move on to shift 4 which would start at 3p since that is when the workload goes back up. This would make shift 4 very short (4 hours) since our workload for that day stops at 7p.

All we did so far was to pencil in three shifts of 8 hours that have different start times based on what the workload requires and one shift of 4 hours. If we compare the workload (what’s needed) and the coverage (what we scheduled), we notice that at 12pm and 1pm, there is one extra person.

There are many things a planner can do to reduce this back to 2. We can reduce shift 1 by two hours or we could add lunch breaks for shifts 2 and 3. Let’s leave the breaks out of it for now and reduce shift 1 by 2 hours.

Of course, these numbers are laid out this way so that they fit nicely in the example. Notice how shift ends and shift starts overlap to cover the peaks of demand. Also notice that with 26 hours of workload, we get 4 shifts of different durations because of these peaks.