Employee scheduling software

Employee scheduling software automates the process of creating and maintaining a schedule. Such software will usually track vacation time, sick time, compensation time, and alert when there are conflicts. As a database of schedules are accumulated over time, it may analyze past activity and prepare data for payroll. Although it may not make strategic decisions to lower costs and improve performance, it does manage the tasks.

For smaller businesses it is increasingly important to keep the costs low on this administrative task, which can be quite large keeping the composition of the modern workforce in mind. Many smaller businesses have part time workers who may be studying on the side or have other jobs they attend to. Flexible management of availability of the employees, shift trading, automatic scheduling processes and the such are key in keeping the costs down. Many vendors are based exclusively online to meet the increasingly web savvy workforce of today.

Scheduling is also done in aviation for flying crews i.e. cockpit crews and cabin crews. Scheduling software enables generation of schedules for the crew on a weekly or monthly basis, providing schedules on the basis of guidelines provided by Civil Aviation requirements, which differ from country to country. These requirements also change when a carrier flies internationally or crosses borders. This software may be a part of an ERP package or a module of such packages, which is effective for an operations department.

Benefits

Employee scheduling software can be an essential part of everyday business processes. Although software won't improve business practices by itself, it does automate typically tedious business administration. Some even calculate factors such as approved employee requests, hours of availability, business hours, business needs, shift trades, etc; and automatically create a work schedule that fits everybody's needs. Shift scheduling experts can be hired to work on strategic challenges if your team can't go it alone, but software typically manages the task of automation and data collection. By providing large amounts of data, management teams can use that data to form opinions and create actionable plans. Some of the benefits are listed below:

• Better achievement of contracted service level agreements
• Field workers completing more jobs per day
• Improved worker, equipment and vehicle utilization
• Increases transparency of field operations
• Minimized job administration costs

Small businesses should consider a variety of factors when evaluating software or web based staff scheduling solutions:

• Learning curve — how quickly staff will be able to get up and running with the new solution.
• Ability to maintain the schedule — web based solutions provide a high level of availability versus locally installed solutions.
• Ability to let staff members collaborate on the schedule — provide their preferences and swap shifts between them.
• Ability to easily identify unassigned shifts.
• Ability to create reports for invoicing and payroll.

See also

• Field Service Management
• Workforce management