Snap Schedule 365 offers you an advanced feature called auto-scheduling, which allows you to generate shift assignments automatically over a certain period of time. Using auto-scheduling will save you time and speed up the process of scheduling shifts.
The only way that auto-scheduling will work is if you define a certain pattern for the schedule generator to use. Oftentimes these patterns can get quite complex, so Snap Schedule 365 provides a simple way to auto-schedule as many shifts as you need to while also giving you the power and precision to control individual shifts that are generated. Read on to learn how to create an auto-generated schedule.
Drag-and-drop scheduling allows you to drag one (or more) shifts onto individual employees. However, auto-scheduling uses a different method of scheduling individual employees. Auto-scheduling allows you to create teams of employees, where each employee can belong to only one team. Then, auto-scheduling will rotate through the team and assign each employee on the team to shifts.
For example, if you have a team of three employees, Adam, Betty, and Carmen, each of the following cases is true:
As employees are assigned individual shifts in drag-and-drop scheduling, teams are assigned shift patterns in auto-scheduling. A shift pattern is simply a bunch of shifts that you want generated over a certain amount of time. A shift pattern is built from shifts. If a shift pattern contains a blank cell, then all members of a certain team will not work that day. A set of shift patterns that cover the same length of time is called a shift pattern table.
For example, if two teams, Team A and Team B, must alternate between two different weekly shift schedules (shift patterns), you would create two shift patterns in a shift pattern table and set Days to equal 7.
Rather than assigning individual shifts to teams, Snap Schedule 365 speeds up the process by allowing you to schedule in a schedule plan. Snap Schedule 365 even provides you with pre-built schedule plans to use if you desire. A schedule plan is built from shift patterns. Scheduling in a schedule plan is a lot like scheduling in the Daily View by Employee. Instead of scheduling employees to work certain shifts on certain days, you are scheduling teams to work certain shift patterns on certain legs (or the number of days in a shift pattern table).
For example, if you use the two teams, Team A and Team B, and shift pattern table from the previous example, you will be able to drag/drop any one of the two shift patterns to either of the teams on any week (7 days, which would be the length of the leg). You cannot drag more than one shift pattern onto a certain team's leg.
The auto-scheduling process is almost finished. In order to create actual shift assignments for each individual employee, you must provider the schedule generator a single schedule plan. Then, you must tell the generator when to start the auto-generated schedule and how many repetitions (cycles) of the schedule plan you would like to generate.
Finally, you can review important information such as the number of teams and employees used, the number of hours and days that will be generated, and the average number of shift hours that both teams and employees will receive.