Scheduling
A single click is all it takes to create optimal employee schedules
AutoScheduler builds optimized schedules based on business needs while respecting all the rules — completely automatically.
Even when the planner is supported by computer systems, producing staff schedules is a time-consuming job. The setup and manual adjustment required by conventional planning tools is tedious and error-prone. Even worse, when changes have to be made to the final schedule, the long calculations involved make it difficult to maintain the efficiency of the schedule. Potential for optimization is often ignored because the available technology is more of a hindrance than a help. Not so with InVision. AutoScheduler enables you to rapidly create an optimized schedule at the touch of a button.
AutoScheduler carries out the entire optimization process in a single step — from long-term shift creation to assignment of individual employees to schedules. If you wish, these schedules can be planned down to the minute. The system automatically makes sure that long-term constraints such as recurring shift patterns and rotating free days are complied with. It also ensures that your staffing requirements are optimally met each day. This fully automates not only the time-consuming process of creating shift plans several months in advance, but also ongoing monitoring to see if the shift plans match current staffing requirements.
What’s more, combining these two planning steps opens up significant potential for further optimization. Generating a complete shift plan first and assigning employees to these shifts as a second step can lead to mismatches and over/understaffing. The result: you’ll often find yourself preoccupied with damage control. But if both steps are performed together in an overall planning process, taking employee constraints into account at all stages, AutoScheduler ensures that your schedules actually meet your needs. What’s more, it does so every single day.
AutoScheduler plans your employees’ work times in such a way that weekly quotas are precisely met. This makes unplanned overtime or undertime a thing of the past. The smooth integration of employees’ work time accounts automatically balances out any deviations from the target time in subsequent planning.
Optimization can be carried out on the desktop or on the server, thus freeing up the desktop PC while optimization is being carried out. You can even have your schedules optimized on several servers simultaneously. This allows you to make the most efficient possible use of the computer power in your network, so that even with very large groups of employees, you’ll get high-quality results quickly.
Planners scheduling in a multi-skill or skills-based routing environment quickly reach the limits of conventional planning systems. Conventional approaches to skills-based scheduling cannot take into account the skill-sets of individual employees and the pooling efficiencies offered by multi-skilling. This frequently leads to over-staffing. Even if you do your planning with the help of simulation, there are practical difficulties. Simulation requires complex setup and maintenance, and very long run-times to generate schedules. That’s why InVision offers a unique optimization process for planning parallel multiple activities and thus delivers optimized skills-based schedules simply, reliably and in a fraction of the time required by other approaches. A patent is pending for this process, which is an integral part of AutoScheduler. MAS lets you enjoy the full benefits of skills-based routing with minimal effort.
With AutoScheduler, you can simultaneously optimize all of the activities within a planning unit, without restriction. For example in a contact center, AutoScheduler can schedule back office work during quiet periods of telephone activity. This ‘joined up’ scheduling is much better than sequentially planning individual activities — a process that may exclude combinations of activities that are more efficient.
When running, AutoScheduler continuously keeps you informed of its progress toward the optimum schedule. You’ll be able to tell at a glance when the optimum is being reached and even whether manual intervention is necessary — for example, if enough employees aren’t available on a given day of the week or month. The zoom function lets you keep abreast of the situation at all times, right down to the tiniest detail.
AutoScheduler, like all of the components of InVision Enterprise WFM, supports virtual structures and multi-site operations without the need for additional modules. For example, you may wish to forecast and define staffing requirements centrally and schedule locally. Or you can make a virtual, cross-location calculation of requirements and have a central department take care of scheduling, leaving local operations free to concentrate on intra-day management. In short, InVision Enterprise WFM offers you unlimited options when it comes to multi-site planning.
