The Lab
The challenge
Creating duty rosters, shift schedules or timetables is an art in itself. Fortunately, there are programs that provide active support! Nevertheless, creating these schedules can become a Herculean task, as there are too many offers for the few rooms in the school or the strict requirements of the regulatory authorities for staffing a residential group are not fully covered by the rota program. As a result, employees have to spend a lot of time improving the automatically generated plans.
Possible Solution
A good solution according to the ideas of the employees of Diakonie Kork would be a program in which the standard rules for the creation of duty rosters, shift schedules or timetables (sometimes also individually per group/department) can be stored. Standard rules could be, for example, the division of specialist/additional staff per shift, adherence to the monthly working hours per employee or similar. These then apply to every creation of a corresponding plan. At the same time, there should be some flexibility, as there are also times at which employees would like to work or have time off. There are also unforeseen appointments, such as doctor’s appointments, when an additional employee needs to be scheduled.
After entering all the rules for creating a rota, ideally 1-3 possible scenarios for a corresponding rota are spit out, from which the employee responsible can then select the best rota.
Boundary conditions
- Comply with the German Data Protection Act (GDPR)
- Open-mindedly adapting the standard rules for creating a duty rota to the conditions specified by the home supervisory authority.
Existing technologies/systems to integrate the solution
- In the best case, it works with CGM products such as P&D or TopSoz, or gives the possibility to upload Excel files.