Situation

"The other issue is with my customer service reps (CSR's).  We have 4 off them at this site. 

• One comes in at 7:00 AM, and leaves at 16:00
• Two come in at 8:00 and leave at 17:00
• One comes in at 10:00 and leaves at 19:00
• But any of these girls can change shifts with each other
• They also swap who works some Saturdays.
• The 10:00 to 19:00 shift works Sunday thru Thursday, Fri and Sat off, but on Wednesday she comes in at 10:00 and works until 19:00.

Confused yet? Basically this is a small department, that has to be manned for certain times, yet the people in the department have a large amount of flexibility within themselves.

First Question

Is the computer supposed to enforce the situation, or it is assumed that the employees are under some sort of other supervision? Usually with small groups of employee's it's that latter, and this is the situation which will be discussed in this tutorial.

Summary

There are 4 possible shifts for the employee to work on on any particular day. They are;

• 7:00 to 16:00
• 8:00 to 17:00
• 10:00 to 19:00
• Day Off

This shift has a rolling shift cycle of 1 day. In other words the shift worked today has no real bearing on the shift worked tomorrow.

Since they can swap shifts freely, it's impossible to predict the pattern which they will follow.

Daily Shifts

So first things first. Create 4 daily shifts, one for each of the parameters above. Make sure you set the schedule right, and you get all the correct details for lunch breaks and so on.

For the sake of this example we'll call these Shifts CSR1, CSR2, CSR3 and CSROff.

Payroll Shift - Putting it all together

First add the shift using the Update Payroll Shift Wizard.

Notice the Rolling Shift Cycle as we first spotted in the description. Notice that the Rolling Shift Cycle does not necessarily have to match the Payroll Cycle.

Ok, now for the really different bit. Instead of creating a 7 day week as we normally do, we're going to create 4 possible lines, each of only 1 day long.

Use the Add Option button (highlighted above) to create the extra lines having 1 day for the week. Then simply edit the details in the same way you would edit a spreadsheet - i.e. just point and start typing.

Notice that the lines are numbered Option 0, 1 2 and 3, they all start at 0 (the start of the day) and instead of numbering them by the usual "Day of the week" name, I've used the basic details for the shift.

Make sure the End (Hour) for each line is set to 24.

The next step is simply to populate the Daily Shifts created earlier onto the lines, and then go to the Expanded Tab to see the finished result.

Discussion

So what happens when a person is assigned to this shift?

Well the computer will first look at their clockings, and make a "Best Fit" decision on which shift the employee is actually working. In the above example, if there were no clockings, then it's safe to say the person was working a Day Off. If the person gets in around 7am, and leaves at around 4pm then the 7 to 4 shift will be chosen.

If the employee doesn't work to any of the patterns, then the computer will short-list which one it might be. From that list it will always pick the shift which has the lowest option value. So if the employee arrives at 7 am, but leaves at 5pm, then a case could be made for both option 0 and option 1. However option 0 will be used because it is of lower option value.

Calculating Leave can also be a bit complicated in this situation. When an employee is on leave then they are always processed according to the lowest possible option. Thus in this case an employee should only be placed on leave for days where they should be paid. For the rest either put them on "Unpaid Leave" or simply leave them alone. As they don't come to work, option 3 which has no schedule will be used.