How to manage a number with 22,560 digits?

Can't workforce management simply be done manually or with the help of a spreadsheet?

Everyone who has ever set up staff schedules knows that a planner has to take a whole range of different factors into account. Many constraints have to be considered, including legislation, local agreements and employee contracts. Budgets, individual employee skills, employee availability and even factors such as team working and car pools all need to be borne in mind.

Schedules must conform to all the rules, but of course that's not all. The plan also has to match your staffing requirements. After all, if a company schedules too many employees, the costs are too high. But if it schedules too few, some customers may not get any service or the company may simply not have enough staff to operate its business.

To get technical for a moment, setting up staff schedules is essentially a ‘combination’ problem. The right combination of employees, work times, and tasks has to be found. The rules must be adhered to and staffing requirements have to be optimally covered.

But how many combinations are there anyway?

Here is a simple example; let's assume that the work times for a total of 25 employees have to be planned for a single task on a single day. The individual employees can start their workday at 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or 10 a.m.. Statistically, the number of possible combinations is therefore 3 to the 25, or 847,288,609,443. In other words, there are more than 847 billion different ways of combining these employees' working times during the day. One or more of these 847 billion possible plans will optimally meet your needs.

Let's assume that these 25 employees are to have more flexible work schedules and can start their workday between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. at 15-minute intervals and work either four, five, six, seven or eight hours a day, on alternating shifts over a five day period. In that case, the number of possibilities increases to 45 to the 125. Checking whether 3 to the 25 schedules conform to the rules and optimally cover staffing needs already sounds like a lot of work, but manually processing 45 to the 125 schedules is hardly imaginable.

Now let's look at a scenario in which the working times of 100 employees doing ten different tasks have to be planned for a month (including breaks). Let’s assume that the working times start at 15-minute intervals between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. and last between four and eight hours in 15-minute increments. Let's also assume that each employee can perform a sequence of up to five different tasks every day. In this scenario, the number of possible combinations increases to 33,126,489 to the 3,000 (a number with 22,560 digits) — even before we've scheduled in a single flexible break.

Not surprisingly, only professional workforce management systems with powerful, automatic optimization capabilities are capable of producing optimal schedules under these conditions. The good news is that with just a few clicks, InVision Enterprise WFM finds the best solution, quickly and easily. Just as importantly, it´s done in a way that is tailored to the structure and objectives of your own business.