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WITH the baby boom going bust, the efficient allocation of staff is becoming one of the most important functions of the FIR department. Scheduling, at its most basic level, is a series of routine tasks. Slot someone in here, take someone out there - it's mathematics,
Everyone assumes that routine tasks, especially mathematical ones, are best done by computers.
Yet schedulers know it's not quite that simple. While it would seem logical to adopt the "in with one, out with another" approach, when you're dealing with people, things get complicated. People have last-minute car problems, snow storms make it impossible for people to get out of their driveways and people's children suddenly take ill.
Yesterday's punch card time and attendance systems couldn't handle the spontaneity inherent in human nature.
Ah - but today's sophisticated Internet and data-line-based time and attendance systems can. Better, in fact, than humans. That's because human schedulers operate in functional silos. Each person in the scheduling chain knows a bit about the people being scheduled.
The manager knows how many people she needs. The HR person knows who's where. The supervisor knows who can do what. The employee knows which blocks of time she needs off, or how much time she wants to work.
With functional silos, each person knows something about the scheduling, but no one knows everything.
Today's sophisticated time and attendance software systems are omniscient - they know everything about everyone. They know where people are, what they want, what they can and can't do. They even know who can be trusted to come in when they say they will, and who can't.
Today's software can be programmed to incorporate dozens, even hundreds of possible scenarios. They can take into account scheduling basics like vacation time, overtime and budgets. They also track overall usage - including who has signed up to work but not shown up. Because they're basically machinery, they're open 24-hoursa-day so last-minute changes to the schedule, even when they happen at midnight, are no problem.
The system
Time and attendance software systems can operate with interactive voice response (IVR). They can be set up to work through the Internet, on a regular...