Blog
“Copy Schedule” helps you keep a consistent schedule
Recently we met with a client who, as opposed to generating a schedule each week, made his from scratch, considering that his schedule did not change much, and he has a smaller staff. Every week using our schedule editor feature he would piece together the schedule, which stayed pretty consistent week to week, with only a few minor changes. This would take him about 20-30 minutes.
We recently released a feature that allows you to copy a schedule from one week to the next. Then using the schedule editor, you can make the minor changes needed. When we showed him this feature, he smiled for a second and said “Wow!! Now the schedule is only going to take me about five minutes!” It is exciting for us at ScheduleTailor to find more and more ways to save people time while making their schedules.
Posted Monday, June 28, 2011
Do I need more staff for summer? ScheduleTailor can answer that.
As the summer months begin, some businesses need to increase the number of employees working at a time to cover the increase in patrons, especially for pools and places of entertainment. In order to do this, the business either needs to hire more staff, or as discussed in an article on the site farmington.patch.com/articles/summer-jobs-for-college-students-remain-scarce, some employers choose to keep the same number of staff, but encourage them to work more hours. It is clear hiring more staff is costly, and should only be done if you have to.
With ScheduleTailor you can easily see the amount of hours you need covered by your staff, and how many hours your current staff is willing to work. This is displayed by the “desired hours report” and “scheduled hours report” displayed on the schedule tab. All you need to do is compare the two numbers to find out if you are overstaffed or understaffed.
Recently we were consulting with a client, teaching them how to use the schedule editor while making their first schedule. When we were finished the manager asked us “So do you think we need to hire more people?” Fortunately, because of ScheduleTailor, this was an easy question to answer. I directed his attention to the desired and scheduled hours report and it was easy to tell that the employment hours his company supplied closely matched the hours demanded by his employees. I replied “No it seems your current employees are willing to work enough hours to cover your required hours.” My response may have saved this manager the unnecessary expense of hiring new, unneeded staff and saved him the trouble of having to schedule more employees than needed.
Posted Monday, May 30, 2011
ScheduleTailor helps manage time-off requests during school holidays
*names and locations have been changed for privacy purposes
Spring break is always a hectic time for scheduling employees, especially for Jake, the city pool manager. His pool employs over 60 lifeguards, 90% of them being high school and college students. With 90% of his employees going on spring break all at the same time, he got bombarded with 27 requests for time off. How on earth is he suppose to keep track of 27 different people requesting time off, and more importantly who is he going to replace them with?
Lucky for Jake he was able to use ScheduleTailor’s “Special Request” feature, which allows employees to log-in and submit a request for time off. Once employees submit their request, Jake has the ability to approve or deny the requests. When he approves a time off request, the schedule generator will automatically know not to schedule that person for that time, and find a person to replace them on the schedule. Jake no longer had to worry about remembering who asked for time off, and then honoring their request, ScheduleTailor did it for him! This allowed Jake to not have to spend so much time fixing the schedule during his busy spring break hours, but rather, he was able to help his staff stay on top of the busy spring break crowd they had coming to the pool that week.
Posted Tuesday, April 26, 2011