Scheduling

SchedulePro

Maximum efficiency for your staff scheduling

SchedulePro helps you plan and manage your staff schedules. Business needs, employee profiles and scheduling rules are taken into account.

Only perfect planning leads to effective staff scheduling

Scheduling rules, contracts, shift patterns, flexible working hours and ever-changing business requirements present a colossal challenge if you manage them manually. However, ensuring that staff schedules remain in line with actual business needs is vital to success in today’s business climate.

SchedulePro gives you the power to perform this difficult balancing act. It’s a central component of workforce management, and it automatically takes into account your staffing requirements, your employee profiles and your scheduling rules in order to create and manage a truly effective schedule.

A tool for all your scheduling needs

Don’t make compromises. SchedulePro automates your entire staff scheduling process — from start to finish. Its wide range of features, intuitive user interface and instant access to your data are unparalleled on the market. SchedulePro will help you to assign staff exactly in accordance with business needs, to comply with all of your scheduling rules, and to meet your employees’ preferences.

Converting staffing requirements into optimized shifts

Whether you operate with flexible 15-minute time slots or a few shifts each day, SchedulePro calculates the most effective combination of shifts or day models based on your staffing needs — at the touch of a button. Only the shift patterns that are possible within your organization are considered. And if you’d like to find out whether introducing a new shift pattern or break time model would have the desired effect on productivity, SchedulePro will show you — with just a few mouse clicks.

Definition of a variable day model

Shift generation with a provision for varying activities

Flexible definition of rotating shift systems

Rotating shift system

Even if you don’t yet operate with fully flexible employee contracts, SchedulePro makes it easier for you to plan and manage your rotating shift systems. It supports every type of rota or shift sequence, from simple early-to-late changeovers to complex models that encompass a large number of shift types over several years.

In addition, flexible working times can be freely combined with fixed shifts. For example, you can set a free day every two weeks that “rolls” through the week from Monday to Sunday but you also want to deploy the right number of staff for the remaining working time.

Real-time data for every user

Planning screen

Thanks to the unique online architecture of InVision Enterprise WFM, every user always has the latest data on-screen without having to refresh or download the page. The InVision Enterprise Server automatically detects when visible data is changed, and instantly updates all of the workstations affected. This eliminates tedious delay, frees up network capacity and opens up a whole new dimension of collaboration. For example, with the help of SchedulePro you can rest assured that planners in Chicago have access to exactly the same up-to-date data as planners in Dallas — even if you’ve just postponed a 10:00 a.m. break by 15 minutes or your capacity planner has just altered the number of budgeted hours.

Online monitoring of all scheduling rules

Automatic rule check

Whichever phase of scheduling you’re in, SchedulePro works in the background to make sure that any changes you make comply with scheduling rules. All rules are taken into account, from legal, wage and contractual terms through to agreements that you have reached with your individual sites and individual employees. Of course, SchedulePro lets you graphically change employee schedules on-the-fly while also alerting you whether this breaks the rules or not.

All rules can be modified to exactly reflect those in force in your organization. If you’re working on international or interdepartmental projects, only the relevant checks are carried out. You also have the freedom to decide in which cases a rule should be strictly applied or merely viewed as a guideline.

Comprehensive dashboard for the planner

• Over-capacity and under-capacity monitoring - SchedulePro continually compares coverage of staffing requirements with the number of scheduled employees and displays any deviations — in graphical form, if desired. That means you can immediately see when you have too few or too many employees scheduled. InVision’s heatmap technology makes it possible to see at a glance to what extent your staffing requirements are covered — or whether you need extra capacity. The bigger the difference between demand and supply, the greater the color contrast.
• Time accounts - All planned and actual time accounts are regularly updated throughout the system. As a result, you can always see how scheduling changes will affect your employees’ overtime or undertime. And you can determine whether deviations recognized by the scheduling system will call for the plan to be changed.
• User-defined parameters - The effectiveness of any staff schedule is measured by business performance indicators such as service level. So why shouldn’t you have access to this information from the scheduling screen? SchedulePro incorporates all of the performance measures from the OnlineCockpit module and displays them alongside the schedule — always up to the minute. You therefore see precisely how your schedule is performing in terms of revenues, costs, profits, service quality and production capacity.
• Online consolidation - All of the parameters are automatically and immediately consolidated within your scheduling structure and at all parent levels. That means team leaders have an overview of their teams, department heads over their departments, managing directors over their companies and CEOs over the entire corporation. And you can see exactly where you’re under pressure or how one department compares to another — all online and without the need for technical skills.

Gallery: Planning-relevant parameters in the Shift Center

Additional features to simplify scheduling

• Rapid drill-down to detailed data - With SchedulePro, you can access all of the detailed data whenever you want. Even from the yearly overview, you can zoom straight in on every single minute of the planning phase — with a single click and without delay.
• Audit trail - provides direct access to the scheduling log at any time. For each scheduling entry, you can use SchedulePro to find out which changes have been made and who made them. And it’s just as simple to ‘undo’ and return to a previous scheduling status.
• Substitute search - rapidly find replacements in case of unplanned absences. If one of your employees is unexpectedly absent due to sickness or another reason, SchedulePro can suggest a replacement to ensure that the absence does not have a negative impact. All of the relevant regulations are, of course, taken into account in this case.
• Simple shift swaps in line with rules - SchedulePro can organize your shift swaps for you. You decide whether you’d like the system to merely suggest suitable replacements, or whether your employees should organize the changeover themselves using the Infothek Interactive Schedule module.
• Integrated scheduling of meetings - If you have to arrange meetings at short notice, SchedulePro looks for the most suitable time when all of the necessary employees are present and the impact on coverage is lowest.

Gallery: Additional features in the Shift Center

Built-in support for virtual structures and multiple sites

SchedulePro, 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 scheduling.

Whichever way you manage your various locations, all of the relevant information is available online throughout the system, all of the time — consolidated and up to date. And thanks to the system’s comprehensive multi-tier architecture and Web interface, you can be sure that you won’t be overtaken by technological developments, now or in the future.

Real-time adherence monitoring

The most perfect schedule in the world is worthless if it is not carried out. That’s why InVision gives you the option of viewing detailed, live comparisons between planned and actual schedules. This is achieved by taking data on employee status from ACDs (in a contact center environment), from InVision Timekeeping or from other external systems — in real-time. That means you can see in real-time if employees are adhering to their schedules, enabling you to take action if required.