Whether a labor forecast is manually derived or automatically constructed from current or historical demand data, the process of labor forecasting provides often amazing opportunities for real cost reduction in an organization. Your forecast may originate from any number of sources; every organization is different. But the ability to incorporate forecasted customer demand into your workforce staffing and scheduling system gives you extraordinary opportunities for cost savings while maintaining complete control over your quality of service.
ScheduleSource Forecasting provides both manual and automated tools for incorporating labor requirements forecasts into your staffing and scheduling decision making.
Headcount Profiles
Headcount profiles are maps of your labor distribution over a period of time, by time increments as low as fifteen minutes. The headcount profile for a particular employee category is the fundamental building block from which the ideal Workforce Staffing Template is derived for a particular demand scenario. This tool is enormously useful for visualizing and understanding the labor supply plan. Headcount profiles provide the raw material for optimization, a process that results in the creation of the optimum staffing template for your organization.
Shift Optimization
Shift optimization is the application of sophisticated mathematics to the optimization of systems when confronted with constraints. In the case of labor shift optimization, the constraints may be shift length minimums or maximums or employee availabilities, but in general, the headcount profile derived from the forecasting process can be converted into a set of shifts that fully meets the requirements of the customer without requiring excess labor costs. If shift lengths are variable it is possible to optimize the schedule so that there are NO excess hours being worked. The study of optimization options often results in the running of various "what if" scenarios to find the ideal mix of work rules that support the workforce needs but control costs.
Staffing Templates
Templates are re-usable, unassigned "pro-forma" schedules. They are a powerful tool for building organizational schedules in complex organizations. Templates can be derived from the forecasting and optimization process or they can be manually constructed by the scheduler. They provide the complete staffing plan for the organization under various scenarios; for instance, a restaurant may have a staffing template for their busy Saturday night that is completely different than its template for a midweek night. Likewise, an organization may have a template for its fixed scheduled full time personnel and maintain a separate template for use in peak periods when temporary or part time personnel are incorporated into the schedule.
The use of ScheduleSource TeamWork templates is an enormously powerful way to model your organization's labor staffing requirements to support any contingency. They can be used alone or in combination to quickly build schedules that are easily populated and published to the web.
