Tag Archives: Scheduling

Another Scheduling Exercise

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You should know the drill by now. You’ll have to make shifts and positions like previous but with a different workload. Like always, one of the many answers will be at your disposal. Good luck!

Schedonomy_BasicScheduling_Other Exercises

Schedonomy_BasicScheduling_Other Exercises (Answers)

It’s Never Over

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“Perfection is a road not a destination.”[1]

 

A perfect plan does not exist. As we discussed at the beginning, change is the only constant. Therefore your plan may be perfect but only for a moment since something will change around you that will make you change that plan (and it is no longer perfect since you have to change it).

 

The same reasoning applies at any level. Your scheduling procedures may be perfect in a planner’s point of view, but they may have to change because of competition or changing demographics around the business.

 

Hopefully, this series was not a cure for insomnia. Its goal was mainly to educate on the importance of scheduling and the impact it can have on any business.

 

A few reminders on what’s important to remember:

  1. The supervisors creating and updating the schedule are spending your money to run your shop
  2. Scheduling is a key element for employee satisfaction
  3. Any strategic decision has the potential to impact the schedule; test the decision on a schedule before writing it in stone

 


[1] Korean proverb. I heard it for the first time in the movie “Remo Williams – the Adventure Begins” in 1985; I guess it stuck with me…

Time Dependant Workload (Part 2 of 2)

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Lets try the same example but with a 9-hour duration maximum. Is it possible to fit 3 shifts of 9 hours instead of 4? This would reduce the number of part-time employees that we would need. Right? And we  should have enough hours since three 9-hour shifts makes 27 hours available and we have 26 hours of work.

 

The table below shows that result. We pencil in 9 hour from the beginning of the day (shift 1) and 9 hours from the end of the day (shift 2). Notice that shift 3 starting at 9a covers the rise and fall of workload at the beginning and end of the day very nicely. But there is a catch. Notice the effect on the coverage. Although there is enough hours for the whole day, they are not distributed according to the actual workload. Coverage shows that there is one employee extra for 3 hours in the afternoon and that there is one missing employee during the peak time of 3p to 5p.

 

This is just to show that peaks and valleys have a significant influence on how the shifts are carved in a day.

 

 26.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

27

1

1

1

2

3

3

3

3

3

2

2

2

1
Shift 1

9

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 2

9

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 3

9

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1
Shift 4

Shift 5

 

The example above was simple. Real workload can produce easily up to 25 shifts per day. It becomes quite difficult to determine the best start and end times when these situations occur. Here are a few simple rules to help carve the shifts when workload is big:

  1. Determine the night shifts first. Usually, night is when workload is at its lowest and night shifts are the ones most employees dislike. They are known to disrupt sleep patterns and cause fatigue.
  2. Work around the peaks. Identify the highest demand in work and pencil in your shifts going both left (for a shift ending after the peak) and right (for a shift starting before the peak). You can determine the final duration of each shift once you’ve established the number of shifts you have.
  3. Determine what is good enough for coverage. If there is a need for 20 employees and you have 19 shifts for that hour, that’s probably good enough. But on the other hand if you need 2 employees and you only have one, you probably need to cover that hour.
  4. Merge the shifts. After the initial carving, you can take a look at shifts that could be merged. This happens when you have a lot of shifts and you don’t necessarily look at long shifts when you are penciling them in. You can reduce the final count by merging a shift that ends at or near the start time of another shift.

Time independent workload

For time independent workload, there is no need to carve shifts based on start and end times. You simply need to decide when

 

Mixed workload

A mixed workload where both time dependant and independent hours need to be assigned will merge both tables together.

 

 

Time Dependant Workload (Part 1 of 2)

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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.

 

 0.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

Shift 1

Shift 2

Shift 3

Shift 4

Shift 5

 

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.

 

 8.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 1

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

 1

Shift 2

Shift 3

Shift 4

Shift 5

 

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.

 

 24.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

24

1

1

1

2

3

3

3

3

2

2

2

1

Shift 1

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

 1

1

Shift 2

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 3

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 4

Shift 5

 

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.

 

 28.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

28

1

1

1

2

3

3

3

3

2

3

3

2

1
Shift 1

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

 1

Shift 2

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 3

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 4

4

1

1

1

1
Shift 5

 

 

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.

 

 26.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Shift 1

6

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 2

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 3

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 4

4

1

1

1

1
Shift 5

 

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.

 

 26.0 / 26.0 Total

6a

7a

8a

9a

10a

11a

12p

1p

2p

3p

4p

5p

6p
Workload

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Coverage

26

1

1

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

3

3

2

1
Shift 1

6

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 2

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 3

8

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Shift 4

4

1

1

1

1
Shift 5

 

Breaking Down the Work

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Your workload has been established, you are a happy planner. You now need to break that workload down to assignable work or into workable shifts. You need to determine start and end times of shifts and their durations.

 

There are many ways to establish the shifts and it mostly depends on the industry your business is in. Manufacturing industries for example will start their business with one day shift on a weekly basis. This gives them a certain capacity that can accommodate some business growth. Once that capacity is surpassed, an evening shift will be added later in the life of the business and so on. The business may elect to use 12-hour shifts instead of 8-hour shifts, but in the end, the shift start and end times are pre-determined. Therefore, in these types of businesses, this step can be skipped since there are not really any questions on how to break down the work.

 

Other businesses like retail will carve their shifts according to the employees’ availability and will determine start and end times based on the employee who would work that shift. Although you may think these types of businesses don’t break down the work by itself, they actually do. Best practice is to compare what you could do if you had the availability you need with the availability you have. So carving the shifts without looking at the employees who would work them gives a good view of a breakdown that would reduce the number of shifts and make the best coverage possible. It is easier to break down a shift or change it afterwards to match an employee but do it knowingly.

 

Breaking the Rules

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No matter all the constraints you put in, an event will happen that will force the planner to break the rules. The most common is to ask employees to stay for another shift (double shift) which breaks the minimum rest rules. Areas like transportation do not allow this practice by law which would expose them to severe fines, but manufacturing and healthcare industries often ask their employees to work double shifts.

 

Another common broken rule is the maximum consecutive days of work. Once the schedule is published and the actual planned day is about to be worked, the planner will ask for overtime and employees may end up working more days in a row because of an additional overtime shift on a day that was planned to be a day off.

 

While you can be very detailed about your constraints, you also need to identify which ones can and cannot be broken. Otherwise, the planners will decide themselves which ones to break causing legal issues later down the road.

 

Some industries identify a set of constraints that apply when the schedule is built and published and another set of constraints for the maintenance and the management of the schedule. This way, the planners do their best to create a schedule that covers the workload knowing full well that things will change anyways. Therefore, some flexibility is given to planners so that they can make modifications to the schedule when reacting to changing circumstances.

 

The important thing to remember is that some constraints should be put in place as guidelines and others should be enforced as law. Once all of them are listed and documented, it is up to the business to determine the value of each constraint and decide to apply it or not. The more constraints planners have, the more difficult schedules become.

 

The Agreement

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As a business grows, there comes a point where all the constraints need to be clearly stated in an employee agreement. Sometimes, the employees themselves take the lead and form a union to force a clear agreement between the business and the employees. These agreements all have their use and importance as they are meant to clear out all the details on many aspects including scheduling.

 

That’s the theory. In practice, when these agreements are negotiated and discussed, the planners are not invited. These things usually happen between employee representatives and Human Resources which represent higher management. The constraints that end up in an agreement may (and will) be interpreted to the letter by both parties to their advantage. What is seen sometimes as an advantage at the time of negotiation all of the sudden becomes a burden because of an unforeseen side effect

 

For example, during negotiations, employees ask to move the minimum rest between shifts from 8 hours to 11 hours. This was due to the fact that the employer can force employees back to work by reverse seniority if staffing is too low to run the plant. Employer says no problem because it won‘t cost him a thing. All agreed and employees are happy not be forced back to work too quickly when staffing is too low.

 

The side effect that no one saw coming is that because the minimum rest was now higher, employees had difficulty arranging shift trades with their buddies. Shift trading was always blocked because the minimum of 11 hours was not respected. Shift trades got to an all time low, and so was employee satisfaction. This turned into higher absenteeism which in turn caused more overtime and more costs.

 

This is just one example of a constraint that was determined without necessarily testing it through from A to Z. A planner could have simulated the changes of the previous month and just wave a red flag on it explaining that all the shift trades would have been refused last month if this rule was in place. Folks would have probably looked for a different solution to the problem.

 

Although some constraints seem insignificant at a first glance, the domino effect can be devastating if it is not looked at the tactical and practical level. Strategic issues will always run the negotiations, but any strategy will eventually turn into a tactical practice. That practice has to be clear before writing the agreement.

 

Training

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Depending on your sector of business, you may have extensive training to keep your employees at an acceptable skill level. Recurring training is sometimes mandatory when public safety and hazardous activities come into play. This adds to the planner’s burden of pre-scheduling training and making sure all employees are kept up to date with the recurring training or license before scheduling them. Training will also remove production capacity from the pool of employees.

 

Although it is seen as a constraint, training is a fixed cost to make sure the business stays productive. If training does not occur, then more production capacity will be lost in the near future when training will become no option because the employees will have lost their licenses to perform the appropriate activities. Planners sometimes cut corners short by canceling training to solve an immediate production coverage problem, but will in the end only cause a greater problem down the road. Scheduling training sometimes involves many groups and resources and therefore are difficult to schedule by themselves. An employee will have to sign up for the next class which may occur only months from now. Therefore, removing an employee from a planned training needs to be a calculated move.

 

In some industries, you also need to train new employees on the job and associate them with a skilled trainer. The planner therefore has to plan a new employee and a trainer to work at the same times and also count the employee’s effectiveness into account. Although there are 2 employees, they only produce as one employee. This association needs to be updated and clearly stated all the way to the point of working to schedule. The employee needs to know who the trainer will be and vice-versa.

 

Some industries will even schedule on the job testing where many instructors will observe an employee before granting them a license. These businesses have the additional challenge to keep their employees up to date using a trainer on a one-on-one basis, but also keep the trainer’s skill at that same level plus the skill of training in itself.

 

Although essential, training does remove a lot of capacity from a productivity perspective. All this training adds constraints to the planner’s ability to schedule efficiently.

 

Self Scheduling

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When self-scheduling is involved, a planner needs to set guidelines as to what self-scheduling means and what is expected of the employees. Self-scheduling can take many forms, but the goal of it is to enhance employee satisfaction by giving them control on their own lives.

 

The first step to do is to clearly count and display the workload that needs to be covered. The workload is the prime aspect and the breakdown into shifts is the thing where everything starts. Coverage measures must therefore be the first constraint employees must follow.

 

The usual next constraints pertain to night and weekend shifts (or any shift that employees typically don’t want). As a planner, you will determine the constraints that apply to each employee in regards to how many good shifts versus bad shifts each get and put together either ratios or direct counts based on the employees full time equivalent value.