Workforce Optimizer

3 Things I learned During my First Year at Workforce Optimizer

Alan — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 01:46:30 +0000

Joining Workforce Optimizer (WFO) brought with it plenty of “firsts”. Not only is this the first start-up that I became a part of, but it was also the first time I had a 100% virtual remote onboarding experience. Not only did I get to know my team members and other departments over Zoom calls and Google Hangouts, but also were there many instances where self-learning and the watching of video recordings were required to get up to speed quickly. Over these past few months, I quickly became a master of Zoom and Google Hangouts and using them today feels as natural as sending an email.

Every day at Workforce Optimizer comes with its own unique sets of challenges and learning opportunities. As a result, it feels like my first year has flown by in an instant. Below, I have outlined three of the key lessons that I’ve learned during my time at WFO, some of which I found to be especially surprising.

Remote onboarding can be challenging but is certainly not impossible

When I joined WFO in April 2020, most countries around the world were experiencing surges in COVID-19 cases, including Singapore, which has since gotten the situation well under control (knocking on wood). In Singapore, the government required most organizations to make working from home the default working arrangement. This was coupled with rules surrounding the maximum number of employees who could visit the office concurrently and by placing a cap on the number of days employees could visit the office in a week.

My first week at WFO was the week when the company was currently busy transitioning to the new work-from-home arrangements. Employees were collecting the necessary office equipment (monitors, headsets, chairs, laptops, tablets, phones, cables, etc.) from the office before the office would be closed for the foreseeable future. I was very fortunate and blessed to have my manager Harun who made a conscious effort to help me gather all the necessary IT equipment and software access so that I could work as seamlessly as possible without being held back by technical difficulties. On my first day at work, Harun delivered my laptop, headset, and other necessary IT equipment to my house. With that settled, I was able to set up a conducive working environment at home, away from distractions such as the couch, bed, or fridge.

After my basic working essentials were covered, my manager Harun made sure to quickly fill up my calendar with training and knowledge transfer sessions to share as much information about Workforce Optimizer, the product, and my responsibilities with me. This not only helped me get to know the company but also prepared me much better for the many product demonstrations and client interactions that I would be about to have. As a bonus, whenever someone in my team did a particularly good job at completing a task, Harun made sure to publicly praise us to make sure that our efforts would not go unnoticed.

To ensure I was on track and to quickly address and overcome any potential obstacles, my team early on decided to have short, but regular stand-up calls at the beginning and end of each day. Usually, about 10-15 minutes long at 9 AM and 5:45 PM, these calls are an easy way for us to update each other on our priorities for the day, help that we require, and potential challenges that we might face. On top of that, these calls often help to give us a feeling of connectedness and social interaction that we would otherwise miss out on.

In summary, the main factors that made remote onboarding seamless were open communication, a supportive manager going out of his way to help and praise you, a distraction-free work-from-home environment as well as regular stand-up meetings and knowledge sharing sessions.

Most organizations are using extremely outdated workforce management tools – and often have valid reasons for doing so

Working in the technology sector, I often expect other companies to consistently evaluate and implement the latest technologies. Joining Workforce Optimizer led to me speaking with leading hospitals and global retail chains in both very technologically advanced countries as well as emerging markets.

Naturally, I was expecting these organizations to have adopted new technologies and to generally have stayed abreast with the latest technology trends, such as cloud software, mobile apps, and machine learning. However, to my big surprise, I could often not have been further from the truth. I discovered in multiple calls with various companies across different industries and countries, that many organizations are still stuck using legacy systems and outdated approaches to workforce management. I can’t count how many times large hospitals or global retail leaders have shared with me that they are using a pen-and-paper-based or an Excel-based approach when scheduling their workforce.

It is not uncommon for me to see shift rosters like these in my day-to-day routine:

Paper-Based Shift Roster

Alternatively, I would often see Excel spreadsheets, which are often also messy and very convoluted:

Excel-based Shift Roster

Many organizations that I speak to also pre-plan their roster in Microsoft Excel and then print out their roster on a paper sheet to post it somewhere for everybody to see and to make changes on the paper with a pen, only to have to later digitize and consolidate the changes in another Excel spreadsheet.

Upon reflecting on why so many organizations are still following these outdated ways of scheduling their workforce, I realized that workforce management is usually a very mission-critical and crucial part of most organizations’ operations. Processes like these were probably set up many years or even decades before and over time simply became the norm. After all, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it?

I began to look around and noticed that there are plenty of examples of outdated or obsolete technologies still being used in today’s modern world. Examples for these include:

Understanding that there is a logical explanation for the use of old technologies can be a lot more meaningful than just outrightly denouncing these technologies as “legacy” or outdated. In the case of a hospital, adopting a modern workforce management solution is often desirable, but if the transition is not seamless and will cause a disruption to the daily operations of managing life-or-death situations, the risk is simply not worth taking and hospitals would rather stick to their tried and tested methods, even if that would mean unwanted side effects such as suboptimal shift scheduling and hours spent on planning daily.

The perfect roster (usually) does not exist

Many news outlets today portray Artificial Intelligence as a malicious superpower approaching singularity which will not only take away all of our jobs but also enslave humanity in the process. As a result, many individuals have unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

When I speak to hospitals, they quite often expect that the Workforce Optimizer AI engine will enable them to create the “perfect roster” which means that operational needs are met, personal preferences are respected and no labor laws and regulations are violated. However, from a mathematical perspective this is often not the case and quite often no “optimal solution”, or “perfect roster” exists based on the rules and constraints that we face (e.g. maximum working hours per day or headcount available to us at any given point in time).

Consider the following example below where we chart out the relationship between the Service Quality delivered in a hospital against the number of nurses that the hospital employs:

Optimal Solution – Example 1

It appears that the service quality is maximized when the hospital employs 7 nurses, after which we can observe a drop in the service quality. It might be because too many nurses might lead to overcrowding or underutilization and therefore a lower service quality. In a perfect world where a hospital has unlimited resources and only cares about maximizing its service quality, the obvious choice would be to employ 7 nurses.

Unfortunately, the real world is often not as straightforward and there are always multiple factors at play. Let us say we now introduce an additional constraint into to above chart: The hospital now only has enough resources to hire up to 5 nurses. Let us see what the optimal strategy would be now if we aim to maximize service quality:

Optimal Solution – Example 2

As we can see, service quality within our feasible region is now maximized when we employ 3 nurses.

Unless we provide our engine with unlimited resources and headcount (which would be a case of severe overstaffing), we are often unable to find an optimal solution or a “perfect roster” that satisfies every stakeholder involved. What the Workforce Optimizer engine can do is to evaluate feasible solutions (those that do not violate any hard rules or mandatory requirements such as labor laws) and find an efficient solution, which is a solution where any objective function cannot be improved without deteriorating one of more other objective functions.

Once we understand and accept this, we can have much more reasonable expectations of the results (such as labor cost savings and time savings) that WFO can provide and we also need not be afraid of having our job and responsibilities as a planner taken away by supreme AI overlords.

The post 3 Things I learned During my First Year at Workforce Optimizer appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Using AI-Enabled Workforce Analytics and AI Scheduling to Combat COVID-19

Alan — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 03:58:57 +0000

Fighting COVID-19 with AI-Enabled Workforce Analytics

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept all of us off of our feet. With the exception of a few Chinese researchers, nobody saw this global pandemic coming and could have imagined how our everyday lives would be impacted in a major way – both personally and professionally.

Workforce Optimizer works with labor-intensive organisations with large workforces which are at a great risk of having their business significantly impacted by potential COVID-19 outbreaks. Examples of those organizations include hospitals, retail chains and public transportation companies.

In today’s article, we will go over some of the features these clients have used in order to effectively combat the virus and accelerate the journey back to the previous “normal”.

Workforce Tracking + Analytics

Organizations with large workforces and complex scheduling across multiple industries track the whereabouts and work hours using Workforce Optimizer’s Time & Attendance management solution. The solution allows clients to track their staff by having them clock in and out using either a mobile app on a smartphone or through the use of other time clock devices, such as fingerprint scanners, RFID tags or other sorts of biometric devices.

Workforce Analytics showing you which employee worked in which location at what point in time is usually used to keep track of the working hours of your employees and to automatically compute their claims (e.g. Overtime). Knowing which teams and employees worked in which department can also be used to quickly pinpoint which employees might be at a greater risk of having contracted COVID-19 and thus support contact tracing efforts.

The above screenshot is from a report that visualizes how many potential infections there might be in each department of the organization. At first, we select one employee who has contracted COVID-19 and subsequently the system will pull all the staff records who have worked the same shift or in the same location as the infected employee. A data export can then be run to see which employees need to be contacted, informed and potentially isolated or quarantined.

In a similar manner, workforce tracking was also used to monitor if employees are adhering to their Stay-Home-Notices (SHNs). If an employee was issued such a notice and still reported to work, an alert was automatically triggered to ensure that their supervisors were informed about this SHN breach.

Dynamic Rescheduling

One of the hospitals relying on Workforce Optimizer’s AI-Scheduling module to create their shift rosters was facing an obstacle related to their shift scheduling after the crisis struck. Their goal was to quickly move from three 8-hour shifts per day to two 12-hour shifts per day. The rationale behind this decision was to reduce the number of times where medical frontliners were either entering or leaving the premises on a daily basis.

The above illustration shows how three shifts per day (Morning, Afternoon and Night) lead to three clock-ins and three clock-outs, for a total of six instances where somebody either enters or exits the premises (i.e. the hospital).

Moving from those three shifts to just two shifts per day (Day and Night) would reduce this to just four instances where employees enter or exit the premises. With less employees entering and leaving, the risk of cross-infection can be significantly reduced. The challenge, however, is to quickly make the shift without interrupting operations and reducing the level of care that patients receive. With the configurable AI-Scheduler, the hospital was able to change their shift rosters to the new scheduling approach in less than an hour, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives instead of being bogged down with the administrative burden of rescheduling thousands of medical staff.

AUTHOR

Florian Parzhuber is a Workforce Management & AI Specialist at Workforce Optimizer, a leading AI-Enabled workforce management solution. Having lived and worked in China, South Korea as well as Europe, he accumulated extensive knowledge on the challenges large enterprises face across the globe. Florian married his interests in technology and social impact at Workforce Optimizer where he hopes to capitalise on the power of machine learning and resource optimization to drive positive social change. He can be reached at [email protected].

The post Using AI-Enabled Workforce Analytics and AI Scheduling to Combat COVID-19 appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Demand Drivers in the Retail Industry and How to Capitalize on them

Alan — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 04:34:22 +0000

Have you ever heard people talk about umbrella sales during rainy weather? Or have you ever travelled to a tourist hotspot in a foreign country and found that certain goods and services were ridiculously overpriced, such as when buying a SIM card upon arrival at a foreign airport?

Example of a SIM card vending machine at an airport

(Source: File:Simcard Vending Machine.JPG. (2012, September 29). File:Simcard Vending Machine.JPG. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simcard_Vending_Machine.JPG)

All of these scenarios are related to retailers analyzing demand drivers and changing their business strategy in response to them in order to maximize sales.

What are Demand Drivers?

Factors that influence the demand for a particular good are often referred to as “Demand Drivers”, simply due to the fact that they drive demand for a good or service.

Just as human behavior tends to be influenced by a plethora of different factors, oftentimes there are a wide range of different factors that can increase or decrease the demand for a good or service. The relevance of demand drivers might vary across different products and even individual consumers, but there are a number of demand drivers that are often used in the retail industry. Examples of these include:

Price

Price is the most commonly used example of a demand driver. If a price is too high, the demand for the product or service usually drops. On the flipside, if a shop lowers the price for a good or service, the demand usually increases.

In economics, the impact of price on demand is often described by the concept of price elasticity:

The above chart visualizes the concept of price elasticity for hamburger and hotdog sales.

We can observe that consumers have a stronger response to changes in hotdog prices as compared to changes in hamburger prices. As the price moves from $2/hotdog to $1/hotdog, the quantity in hotdog sales moves from 150 hotdogs to 300 hotdogs. In comparison, hamburger sales only increase from 225 to 300 assuming the same price changes. As the rate of change in hotdog sales in relation to price is larger than that of hamburger sales, hotdogs are said to have a “greater price elasticity”. A product is said to be “price inelastic” when the demand does not change with respect to price.

Weather

Weather is an intuitive example of a demand driver. Say you have the choice of operating an ice cream store on a hot day versus on a rainy day and your sole goal is to make as much money as possible. Would you rather choose the hot day or the rainy day? Most likely, you will expect to have more customers interested in purchasing ice cream on a hot day than on a rainy day. Do note that for other products the relationship between weather and sales might be the direct opposite, such as when selling umbrellas or raincoats.

Promotions & Discounts

For bargain hunters among us, it should come to no surprise that promotions and discounts can be effective tools to temporarily increase the demand for a good or service. This strategy is even more powerful when the promotion only lasts for a set amount of time, thereby creating a sense of scarcity and urgency. Repeated discounts can lose their novelty and effectiveness over time and as a result, discounts should be used with caution.

Location

The location of a retail store can also have a significant impact on the number of sales that will occur. If a store is in a remote location, people might be less inclined to go out of their way to travel to the establishment to buy a product from here. On the other hand, if a store is located on your way to work, customers might be more inclined to make an impulse purchase when walking past.

Queues (Abandonment vs. sign of quality)

Queue times can either increase or decrease the demand for a good or service. If the product or service is not deemed to be worth the wait, consumers will quickly abandon the queue and purchase. However, queues can also signal that a product is highly desirable. The picture below shows you how long people were willing to queue for the latest iPhone, because the product was deemed as worth the wait.

(Source:AsiaOne. (2019, September 19). AsiaOne iPhone Queue. AsiaOne IPhone Queue. https://www.asiaone.com/sites/default/files/styles/a1_og_image/public/original_images/Sep2019/190919_iphonequeue2_Facebook.jpg?itok=R8hP8O1Q)

Special Circumstances and Events (e.g. COVID-19)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a clear example of how an external event or circumstance can influence the demand of a service or good. Shoppers afraid of the virus might be too scared to leave their houses and join other crowds of shoppers and as a result, thus leading to a reduction in consumer spending. Following the same logic, we might also observe an increase in online sales (incl. delivery), which shows that the same demand driver can have very varying impacts on the different channels of your retail business.

Convenience

Many times the convenience of making a purchase can be a major contributor to whether or not a purchase happens. If the weather is rainy, it might be more convenient to place a food delivery order. If I do not want to speak to a retail assistant and can place my order through an electronic kiosk, I might be more inclined to make a purchase in a fast-food chain such as McDonalds.

(Source:Rensi, E. (2018, July 11). McDonald’s Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds-says-goodbye-cashiers-hello-kiosks/#13eedc476f14)

Sales Channels (E-Commerce, Agents, Retail)

Different sales channels might work better for different goods. When purchasing health insurance, many people prefer to go through an agent who acts as a trusted advisor. E-Commerce can often offer more choice and cheaper prices. Many people prefer to purchase clothing in retail environments as it allows them to feel the fabric and to try if the attire fits well. As you can see, demand drivers are not necessarily outside of your organization and might even be under your control to a certain extent.

Footfall

Footfall is often looked at as the “king of demand drivers” in the retail industry because it is a factor that can predict future sales fairly accurately. If you have zero people entering your store, you will not be able to sell any goods, no matter how beautifully decorated your shop is. Another advantage of looking at footfall is how easy it is to track, monitor and analyze it.

Competition (Substitutes vs. Complements)

Looking at the competition, such as nearby shops selling similar goods, can also give you meaningful insights. If a customer purchases an iPhone, the chances of that same customer buying an Android phone might be slim because most people are well off with just one smartphone.

Complements are products that would complement a purchase – for example, after buying an iPhone, the chance of you purchasing an iPhone case is most likely high.

Consumer Income Levels (Inferior Goods vs. Normal Goods)

In economics, goods are often categorized into two categories: Inferior Goods and Normal Goods. Inferior goods are goods for which the demand drops as consumer income levels increase (e.g. instant noodles).

Normal goods are products or services for which the demand increases as income levels rise. Examples of that could be handbags, real estate, clothing, household appliances, etc.

Often a key difference between inferior goods and normal goods is a difference in the quality of the goods themselves. When income levels drop or the economy as a whole contracts, consumers might be more likely to turn to purchase inferior goods.

How to capitalize on demand drivers?

Now that we have taken a look at the most common demand drivers (the list is certainly not exhaustive and there are plenty of other factors that can drive the demand for a good in a retail setting), we need to ask ourselves how we can turn this knowledge into an advantage that we can capitalize on. In other words, how can we be prepared to make a sale when a demand driver is driving a sale our way? In the following sections, we will discuss three key steps to capitalize on demand drivers in a retail environment.

Differentiate between relevant and irrelevant demand drivers and use them to forecast sales

Understanding which demand drivers influence sales can be a helpful tool to help you forecast future sales. While weather might have a large impact on ice cream sales, the location of the ice cream store might be even more important. No matter how hot or sunny the weather is, if your store is too far away, consumers won’t be willing to buy ice cream at your store. It is therefore important to understand which particular demand drivers influence your business and which have irrelevant or negligible impact on your business.

Forecasting might not always be as straightforward as a straight trendline

(Source:Bhaarath, V. (2020, May 5). Time Series Forecasting – Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine. Medium. https://becominghuman.ai/time-series-forecasting-7ac3344a8588?gi=1aa0b60c2f5d)

Walmart’s expansion to Germany in 1997 is a good example of a failure to understand the relevant demand drivers for their business. One of the reasons why Walmart never managed to achieve scalable profitability in Germany was because it did not fully understand the “Pricing” demand driver in the local market. After slashing their prices with a technique called “penetration pricing” to rapidly gain market share in Germany, the German High Court ordered Walmart to raise their prices. This was done to prevent Walmart from gaining a monopoly in the local market and to encourage healthy competition with other local retailers. Because of this (and other reasons). Walmart decided to leave the German retail industry in 2006 after incurring a US$1B loss in their expansion to Germany.

(Source:Jackson, B. (2019, February 22). Single Post. Brittany Jackson. https://brittaniaten.wixsite.com/brittanyjackson/single-post/2017/12/19/Wal-marts-Expansion-Their-North-and-South-American-Success-and-German-Failure)

Track demand drivers and monitor them in real-time

Knowing which demand drivers are relevant is only one piece of the puzzle. You also need to track the relevant demand driver data to be used for strategic decision making. With the right data available to you, it will be much easier to recognize consumer behavior, recognize patterns and trends. For instance, you might be interested in footfall by day of the week and recognize that consumers are more likely to make most of their purchases on weekends. In addition to tracking these data points over time (historical analysis), you might want to factor in real-time data such as footfall (captured by CCTV systems) or sales figures (captured by POS systems) to make adjustments to your forecast in real-time. The rise of footfall counting systems is a major change in the retail industry that has gone unnoticed by many of us.

Adjust your operations to your unique drivers to best translate demand into sales

After recognizing which demand drivers influence your business the most and tracking them both in real-time and factoring in historical trends, the next logical step is to translate this intelligence into actionable business decisions which will generate additional revenue.

One area in which retailers can do this is by dynamically adjusting their staffing levels in response to the most relevant demand drivers of the business. Most retailers follow relatively fixed staffing levels for their workforce (e.g. cashiers, stockers, cleaners, etc.). While this approach is simple to understand, manage and follow, it often fails to factor in an appropriate response to the relevant demand drivers of this business. This can lead to a misalignment between the demand (i.e. sales) and supply (i.e. workforce). If demand exceeds the supply, this will often lead to long queue times, poor customer service and overtime required by the workforce. Conversely, if supply exceeds demand, the workforce will be idle and not generate any revenue, while the business still needs to remunerate them for their time.

In an ideal world, achieving a perfect balance between supply and demand would eliminate any inefficiencies and wastage (unnecessary cost or lost revenue). Fortunately, this ideal world is no longer just part of a distant future utopia thanks to the help of technology. Workforce Optimizer is an AI-enabled workforce management provider that can track and analyze the relevant demand drivers for a retail business and provide real-time feedback and make decisions related to the company’s staffing needs at a 15-minute interval. This is done by taking a combination of historical data points (e.g. sales figures for the last 2 years) and a real-time data source (e.g. sales figures reported by the POS system or number of footfall captured by a camera). If the amount of footfall suddenly drops, the Workforce Optimizer platform might choose to give retail workers an early break or shorter shift to better prepare them for future points in time when the demand might spike (e.g. during a lunch break). Using historical data, we at Workforce Optimizer have found that we can achieve a decrease in the misalignment between supply and demand from +/- 10% to +/-2%, leading to a reduction in cost per unit of service of 5%-15%.

Conclusion

In the real world, several hundreds of factors might impact the demand for your products and services. Luckily, most of the time a handful of these factors will allow you to make relatively accurate and meaningful predictions. Coupled with the right technology and tools, you can ensure that your business minimizes inefficiencies and waste such as staffing overcapacity and overtime hours while at the same time achieving revenue growth.

Interested to learn more? Contact us here for a free consultation with one of our workforce management consultants.

AUTHOR

The post Demand Drivers in the Retail Industry and How to Capitalize on them appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

How Fixed Shift Patterns are costing your organization money

Alan — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 09:39:38 +0000

What are fixed shift patterns?

Chances are, you are or have followed a fixed shift pattern at one point in your life. In fact, if you are working a regular 9-5 job and are reading this while at work, you are currently following a fixed shift pattern of five individual shifts from 9AM to 5PM, Monday through Friday.

We often don’t think about fixed shift patterns as we simply take our daily work routines for granted. More often, we associate shift workers with industries that need to operate around the clock, 24/7 365 days a year. Examples of such industries are the healthcare sector, where nurses need to work around the clock to care for patients that could be admitted to the hospital at any given point in time. Other industries include manufacturing, public transportation and retail.

A fixed shift pattern, sometimes also referred to as a “repeated shift pattern”, is simply a routine of working hours that you follow for a specific time interval. Nurses, factory workers, retail assistants and railway inspectors might follow a repeating pattern consisting of blocks of morning, afternoon and night shifts:

Why do organizations use fixed shift patterns?

After reading the title of this article, you might be wondering why the use of fixed shift patterns is so widespread, even though they could cost your organization a hefty amount of money. After all, if fixed shift patterns are bad or inefficient, what could be reasonable explanations why organizations in various industries continue to adopt them? Simply put: Shift plans based on fixed shift patterns are easy to create and follow.

If you have ever planned the working hours for a group of people, it is likely that you have realized how complex it can be. Making changes to one person’s schedule could impact the schedule of another person. The workload might not be distributed evenly, resulting in a sense of unfairness. Ad-hoc changes might be needed, if people report sick for work at the last possible minute. And as the number of people in your schedule increases, so does the complexity of your scheduling problem at an exponential rate. Quite often, generating a shift plan that is operationally viable is a big challenge in itself, such that optimization remains an afterthought.

If you look at the above visual representation of a fixed shift pattern, you quickly realize that every team is working exactly the same shift pattern (Morning ⇒ Afternoon ⇒ Night), offset by one week. The beauty of this fixed shift pattern is that it automatically ensures that we will have one team working the morning shift, one team working the afternoon shift and one team working the night shift. This is helpful, because it will help to ensure that every team is treated equally and will work an equal amount of working hours. However, there might be instances where locking our workforce into a particular pattern might actually be detrimental to the business – something we will discuss in the next section.

Finally, another key benefit of a fixed shift pattern is that they are usually easy to remember and easy to communicate. Once your workforce has seen and understood the fixed shift pattern, you no longer need to update them on a daily basis about changes to their working hours. Fixed shift patterns usually also repeat indefinitely, meaning that you only need to configure them once and they will then take care of the rest, forever. Not having to communicate changes to your workforce on a daily basis not only takes effort off your shoulders, but also decreases confusion and increases your staff’s adherence to their work schedule. So what are some of the gaps that fixed shift patterns have and why do industries with unpredictable demands often choose to go for alternative ways of scheduling their workforce?

The pitfalls of fixed shift patterns

To understand the disadvantages of fixed shift patterns, we need to take a closer look at the term itself: “fixed shift pattern” highlights a crucial characteristic of this scheduling approach: It is fixed – static, rigid and inflexible and often fails to take into account the changing business needs and daily fluctuations in the amount of work that needs to be carried out (i.e. demand).

Once we fix a work schedule to be a certain way, we sacrifice flexibility for certainty. As my finance professor always used to say: – “Having options is valuable.” – and having a workforce that is fixed and predetermined to follow a certain work schedule eliminates options and often causes inefficiencies in the day-to-day operations.

Let me give you the example from the manufacturing world:

In the automobile industry, factories often operate assembly lines that run seven days a week, 24 hours per day. One of the key reasons for that is that starting and stopping the assembly line can be a very costly undertaking. Surveys with automobile manufacturing executives have shown that stopped production costs anywhere from US$22,000 – US$50,000 per minute. To keep such an assembly line up and running through fixed shift patterns alone can be a challenging task as the number of cars produced and number of employees working on the assembly line can vary on a day-to-day basis. If you adopt a fixed shift pattern consisting of three 8-hour shifts per day, all it takes is that one employee reports sick for work or the need to produce twice as many cars in a day and the entire assembly line will come to a halt or operate sub-optimally. The reason? We have failed to incorporate the dynamic needs of the business into our scheduling exercise.

An even more serious example could be in the healthcare industry, where the number of patients is often seasonal and variable. Imagine you are blindly adopting a fixed shift pattern in a hospital setting and suddenly there is a huge influx of new patients being admitted. As a result, you will be unable to provide the right levels of care to your patients, which could even result in a life-or-death situation.

In summary, while fixed shift patterns are easy to create and follow (there are plenty of free templates available online), they often sacrifice flexibility for consistency, reduce the number of available scheduling choices and fail to take into consideration the actual, changing needs of the business on a day-to-day basis.

The alternative: Dynamic, AI-Enabled scheduling

In order to understand the potential of AI-enabled shift scheduling, let me borrow from a concept from the field of mathematical optimization. In mathematical optimization, there is a concept called “feasible solution” or “feasible region”, which describes all the solutions that fulfill the constraints of the optimization problem. To put this into a shift scheduling context: The feasible region contains all the possible permutations of shift timings for each employee that would not violate constraints such as labor laws (maximum overtime hours per day, minimum rest days per week, etc.).

Let’s assume the following example from the field of Linear Programming to add some life to this example:

We operate a hamburger shop and employ 2 employees, Billy and Bella. Our goal is to prepare as many hamburgers as possible while staying within our budget of $50. Billy makes $5 per hour and Bella makes $10 per hour. Bella is more experienced than Billy and is able to prepare 12 hamburgers per hour and Billy can only prepare 2 hamburgers per hour.

A simple chart can be used to visualize a feasible region (shaded in red) for this optimization problem:

At both extremes, we could either:

Engage Bella for 5 hours (5 hours x $10/hr = $50) and Billy for 0 hours
Engage Billy for 10 hours (10 hours x $5/hr = $50) and Bella for 0 hours

Alternatively, we could engage Billy for 6 hours and Bella for 2 hours or find any other possible combination below the blue line.The feasible region (all possible combinations that would not cause us to exceed our $50 budget) are all within the red shaded area.

If our goal is to prepare as many hamburgers as possible, we will choose to engage Bella for 5 hours, allowing us to prepare 12 hamburgers/hour x 5 hours = 60 hamburgers.

Now let’s assume that we put Billy on a fixed shift pattern which requires us to engage him for at least 2 hours per week. We can visualize that in the following manner:

As we can see, our feasible region has gotten smaller by the area shaded in yellow. What this means, is that we now have less options available to us when it comes to choosing how many hours of Billy’s and how many hours of Bella’s time we would like to engage.

The optimal strategy has changed: We will engage Billy for the minimum requirement of 2 hours and Bella for 4 hours with our remaining budget, allowing us to prepare (4 hours x 12 hamburgers/hour) + 2 hours x 2 hamburgers/hour = 52 hamburgers in total.

As shown above, putting Billy on a fixed shift pattern has reduced our feasible region and thus led to us being able to prepare less hamburgers (60 vs 52, that’s a loss of 8 juicy, delicious hamburgers!).

The above example is just a simple illustration from the world of Linear Programming where we are comparing the possible combinations when engaging 2 different resources (Billy’s and Bella’s time).

In the real world, problems like these are much more complex, workforces are much larger (often in the tens of thousands) and there are hundreds of considerations that need to be factored in (labor laws, employee shift preferences, supply vs. demand, etc.). With more resources and longer time frames, we will have a much larger number of possible permutations (shift assignments for individual employees) and introducing a fixed shift pattern will cause us to reduce our feasible region.

The best of both worlds? A hybrid approach

Are fixed shift patterns and AI-enabled shift scheduling mutually exclusive? Definitely not. In fact, many organizations that put a lot of thought into the scheduling of their workforce understand that a hybrid approach might be the best fit for them: Combining the simplicity of fixed shift patterns with the enormous potential for optimization that AI-enabled shift scheduling provides.

Examples of that could be putting your staff on a repeated pattern three days a week and filling the remaining two working days as demand emerges. Some organizations negotiate fixed working hours with each employee individually, resulting in a wide range of unique fixed shift patterns, which can come with its own set of challenges. As a general rule, the following table can highlight the pros and cons of fixed shift patterns, dynamic AI-enabled shift scheduling and a hybrid approach:

Conclusion

Are fixed shift patterns always bad and inferior to dynamic, AI-enabled shift scheduling? Certainly not. In some cases, especially in small organizations, it might make more sense to use a simple-to-follow and straightforward fixed shift pattern. However, as organizations grow and as their scheduling requirements become more complex, the potential for improvement (labor cost savings, better customer service, improved patient care) also grows and it quickly starts making sense to explore how AI-enabled shift scheduling can improve the allocation of manpower resources (supply) to demand (tasks). That being said, fixed shift patterns and AI-enabled shift scheduling need not be mutually exclusive and a balance can be struck by adopting a hybrid approach in order to try to combine the best of both worlds: The straightforwardness of fixed shift patterns combined with the potential for optimization through AI-enabled shift scheduling.

Curious to learn what the best shift scheduling approach for your organization might be? Contact us for a free workforce management consultation.

AUTHOR

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How a Time and Attendance Software Can Help the Healthcare Sector During the COVID-19 Crisis

Alan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 05:55:57 +0000

Different healthcare professionals face different problems. As most hospitals have round-the-clock shifts and operate 24/7/365, their challenges are often linked to one of the following topics:

Time and Attendance Tracking and Management
Flexible staff scheduling
Immediate staff redeployment during crisis situations (e.g. COVID-19)
Accurate and timely budgeting
Complex claims and allowance computations

All of these tasks often create a large amount of administrative demands that take away time that could be better spent providing quality care for patients. It can take a serious toll on the overall ability to provide quality care for the patients.

Imagine spending uncountable hours creating schedules, manually entering payroll information, and handling scheduling requests from each and every employee. Does that sound like a normal routine for someone working in the healthcare sector? Too often, the answer to that question is “yes”. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, then it is that it’s time to open up to the world of time and attendance software and learn about it.

So, why healthcare?

As the common saying goes – “Health is wealth.” – health is the only thing that money cannot buy (yet) and if it deteriorates, anything else becomes insignificant. Care is something the entire world needs at this point in time, including hospital staff and caretakers. The COVID-19 pandemic has encapsulated the world with unforeseen outcome and panic. The disease is spreading rapidly, leaving behind sick patients and deprived individuals.

Every hospital spread across the globe is seeing a spike in patient admissions. With each day, the number of people who require medical attention is rising; overburdening the hospitals and draining out every ounce of energy from their workforce. In the fight to defeat the Coronavirus, medical institutions and hospitals are in the forefront. They are taking the majority of the blows for the people behind them.

At the front, we see them battling against the pandemic with all their might and will. We see hospital staff and doctors putting all they can to save lives and stop the spread of the virus. What we don’t see is the challenges that they face. What we don’t see is the number of threats and perils, which can often be even more intimidating than the pandemic itself.

The Current State of Global Healthcare

On March 11, 2020, novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are felt across the globe as the number of infected individuals is growing exponentially.

Given the prevalence of the coronavirus globally, it is imperative for health care employers to take extra precaution for their employees. It is evident from all public health communications that the efforts to flatten the growth curve of COVID-19 will not only prevent illness, but will also reduce the pandemic’s potential to overwhelm critical health care resources.

During times of a pandemic, working protocols can often become neglected and chaos can ensue. Working shifts might frequently change as the influx of new patients can be unpredictable. Requiring nurses to work on an ad-hoc basis can often complicate matters related to payroll if no system for automated time and attendance tracking is in place.

Hospital management needs to have proper insights into its labour data and keep an eye on every movement of its employees for the sake of contact tracing. With the right technology, large hospitals in Singapore and Hong Kong are trying to strike the right balance between labour demands and staffing levels and to enhance their contact tracing efforts.

Challenges Faced by Hospitals

A catastrophic situation calls for desperate measures. Such overnight changes affect the regular schedules of each and every hospital staff member. Not only do hospitals have to manage the influx of patients, they also have to be vigilant with their management and superintendence, thereby improving overall patient care amidst the challenges they face everyday.

Challenge #1:- Hospital Compliance and Adherence to Rules

Many hospitals have made significant changes in their daily shift schedule in order to meet the rising patient care demands. Many hospital staffers are working as long as 12 hours a day. Most hospitals are taking the call to split their staff into two separate teams, each team working a 12-hour shift.

This has led to drastic changes in their daily attendance schedule. The attendance scheduling system has had to go through a complete change where, instead of assigning individual shift timings to each employee, the staff is split into two teams, i.e. Team A and Team B. Each team assigned a shift with a fixed duration of 12 hours. Further attendance can be then done based on this schedule. These are immediate and effective changes that need to come into effect during demanding times such as the ones posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Solution

A staffing and attendance solution can quickly help hospital management to split its staff and assign shifts directly from the software. The staffing and attendance software should automatically send notifications about the schedule changes, making sure each staff member is aware of the proposed changes.

On top of that, hospital management also needs to ensure that its sick employees are granted medical leaves immediately in order to minimize the cross-contamination risk. Leave can be of two, three or five days depending upon the agreed terms.

A sophisticated workforce management solution should allow its employees to easily upload their medical certificates such that their leave can be granted quickly. Employees should not have to go through the hassle of manually reaching out to their manager through communication platforms such as WhatsApp in order to request for their leave. More importantly, a modern workforce management solution should automatically track and flag the employees violating the leave policies (e.g. taking more leave than they are entitled to or not showing up for work at all). Hospitals need to keep track of their employee’s presence and absence and automatically flag those who do not adhere to the rules.

Lastly, many employees have been asked to self-quarantine. Those who contracted the coronavirus or the medical staffers who show symptoms of COVID-19 have to make sure they stay at home and follow social distancing. Medical supervisors and managers are obligated to pass an order for them to quarantine themselves and present them with a letter of authorization stating they have been asked to stay away from work under unavoidable circumstances.

These administrative tasks should not be communicated in person (again, due to cross-contamination risk). Additionally, these administrative tasks can suck up a lot of time that should be better spent caring for hospital patients. Hospital management should be able to broadcast new policies and shift changes directly from its workforce management solution to ensure that every staff member is up-to-date.. If an Employee A is found to have contracted the Coronavirus, the entire hospital staff should be made aware. A smart workforce management system should mark Employee A as home-quarantined and ensure that staff replacements for employee A are quickly found.

Challenge #2:- High-Fidelity Employee Tracing

In response to the global pandemic, it is amazing to see how quickly countries and especially the frontliners are taking uber-necessary steps and precautions; setting examples for future pandemics. Singapore, for instance, taught the world what to do during this crisis: The Singaporean government and hospitals made sure that the use of N95 masks, face-protectors, goggles, and gowns are reserved for proceedings where respiratory secretions can be aerosolized and for other known or suspected cases of COVID-19.

The Solution

Singapore made its quarantine policies more nuanced. If a hospital staff tests positive for the Coronavirus, the Singaporean government used a mix of bluetooth-enabled mobile applications and sophisticated workformance management solutions to quickly conduct contact tracing and find out who was in ‘close contact’ with the infected individual.

How is this done? Hospital management uses meticulous attendance and time tracking software to accurately track when and where each hospital staff was.

If the exposure is found to be shorter than the prescribed limit but within six feet for more than two minutes, the hospital staff can stay on the job if they wear a surgical mask and have twice-daily temperature checks. Staff who have had brief, incidental contact with an infected individual were asked to monitor themselves for symptoms (e.g. dry cough, fever, loss of taste and smell).

Benefits of Time & Attendance Systems in the Healthcare sector

Unlike in other industries, healthcare professionals are rarely able to work remotely. Healthcare providers often need to employ numerous hourly workers who are non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act; which varies by country due to differing labour regulations.

Hospitals have to manage potential work shortages, consider extending work hours, cross-training employees when they have to cover for absent coworkers, and have to create teams that can cover for absent or overworked employees. All of this should be seamlessly managed by a robust workforce optimization solution.

1. Creating a secure attendance system

In the healthcare sector, nurse managers frequently have to manage multiple shifts of the nurses they are supervising. Using manual systems such as logbooks (paper & pen) can make them vulnerable to human error.

Employees might attempt to carry out attendance fraud through methods such as “buddy punching” or “tailgating”. A modern time and attendance tracking solution should allow for accurate time tracking and prevent attendance fraud. With a state-of-the-art software in place, hospital management should gain deeper insights from the detailed reports that are generated by the software. Information regarding sick leave, paid leave, unpaid leaves and public holidays should be available with the click of a button.

2. Improving the overall quality of patient care and employee care

When everything in an organization runs smoothly and the organization has a positive atmosphere, its output is generally good. Studies have shown that when employees are happy, they tend to be more productive. Immaculate management of time and attendance can go a very long way in streamlining your daily operations, increasing employee morale and improving productivity. The level of staffing optimization is directly linked to improved patient care.

Hospital staffers and doctors are the ones who come in regular contact with the sick patients, drastically increasing the chances for them to contract the virus. Hospital authorities need to keep a close eye on each and every employee who comes in close contact with infected individuals. The rapid expansion of the COVID-19 virus can be attributed to a lack of awareness and precaution. For example: doctors and hospital staff in Italy did not quarantine themselves and continued with their daily routines even after coming into contact with patients infected with COVID-19. Many hospitals failed to keep a clear track of where their employees were going, with whom they were meeting which rooms they entered and who else might have become cross-contaminated.

This led to an explosion of the Coronavirus across multiple hospitals in Italy. Had the hospitals kept a clear track of the aforementioned factors, they might have been able to curb the epidemic and nip it in the bud. This is another reason why a time and attendance solution can be of utmost importance in the healthcare sector. Hospitals can easily track the footprints of hospital staff and augment their contact tracing initiatives.

3. Accurate payroll processing

An inaccuracy in payroll processing is always costly for hospitals and a headache for its employees. With hundreds of staff members working round the clock in different shifts, working overtime and night shifts, taking prolonged or shorter amounts of breaks, complexity is not unexpected and quite often chaos can ensue. A modern time and attendance system can precisely track the hours worked by each and every employee and calculates the salary accordingly.

Conclusion

Hospitals always need to ensure that patient care is their number one priority. It can not be compromised, neither during any normal day or during crisis situations such as the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. Besides patient care, hospitals need to ensure that their staff is being treated fairly and that they have complete visibility and transparency into their shift schedule. This is where a time and attendance solution can function as a bridge between hospital management and the ground staff making it easy for the hospital to have the perfect balance between patient care and workforce optimization.

Workforce Optimization software can be a boon any hospital would look for during the time of emergency and deadlock. Technology is not just a necessity, but a utility. If utilized correctly it can help humans augment their current capabilities and rise above the occasion to deal with pandemics such as COVID-19. A situation like this requires hospitals to maintain harmony among the staffers by not overburdening them with unoptimized work schedules. The right workforce management software can help hospitals conduct contact tracing and quickly make the required staffing changes. Technology has the potential to enable healthcare professionals to save countless lives.

The post How a Time and Attendance Software Can Help the Healthcare Sector During the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

5 Ways Scheduling Software can Save Lives in Times of Crisis

Alan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 05:38:19 +0000

In the wee hours of a rather relaxing weekend, Sergio Marino, a lead medical supritendent and an expert in infectious diseases at Casacordia Hospital in Rome, received a distress call. Being a doctor, receiving emergency calls was nothing unusual for him. However, this call was different. He was well aware about the ongoing pandemic across the globe pertaining to the COVID-19 outbreak. There were a handful of cases spread across the country but none that belonged to his hospital.

For Marino, this call was about to send him and his colleagues in a storm of unprecedented circumstances. Considering that the virus had not hit their country, a handful of staff members were on paid leave while the others had their shifts scheduled later into the day. Little did anyone know that the day was going to be very long.

Real World Scenario

What happens when one lethal virus brings the entire human population at a standstill for a period of time? We are facing a never before seen crisis today. It is this virus versus the entire globe today. And we are fighting it with all our might. Each one of us is in this together, standing strong on the shoulders of leading medical researchers, teams of doctors, nurses, and medical practitioners. They are leading us in this fight, the real superheroes this world needs at this time who have been given the responsibility of taking us all through the end of this dark tunnel.

Globally, hospitals are crowded with patients falling sick; some of them needing high-priority medical assistance, others needing intensive care, medical attention, diagnosis, medicines and everything possible to save lives and stand strong against this global pandemic. Crisis will be an understatement when describing their current situation where there is acute shortage of medical equipment as well as medical staff. With the sudden increase in demand for patient care and medical assistance, an unprecedented avalanche of challenges like staff scheduling, availability of doctors and nurses etc came down on the healthcare institutions across the globe.

The Problem

Both, the people who are infected and the ones who are healthy are finding ways to stay healthy and fight against the pathogen and stay safe from the rapidly spreading virus respectively. Their real challenge lies in getting immediate medical assistance before it is too late.

When you step into the shoes of doctors, their area of concern is broader and much more complex if not handled wisely. along with providing dedicated catering to each and every affected patient with utmost care and sincerity, they also have to ensure that their workforce’s time is optimised meticulously. With the rising number of cases being admitted in the hospitals, the frontline healthcare workers are posed with another major challenge of workforce optimization. Having an organized workforce and intricately managed staff is directly proportional to timely and attentive care of the ones who are infected.

Staffing Appropriately at the Time of Pandemic

When a pandemic of this scale hits, it can send even the largest organizations into a tizzy. A situation may arise where there are a number of sick employees, employees who are caring for sick family members and employees who do not come to work out of fear of becoming ill. On top of that, there may be a significant need for social distancing in order to limit the number of persons concentrated in the workplace.

A scenario like that requires special handling of staffing and attendance and leave issues. Hospitals have to come up with a Continuation of Operations Plan (COOP) / Business Continuity Plan (BCP). The need to identify mission-essential functions and employees who will be responsible for carrying out these functions becomes vital.

In order to carry out the aforementioned activities in the most seamless way possible, we need to put technology to work. Doctors can significantly benefit from automated software which can help them plan the attendance and staffing of their hospital for the upcoming week. In our scenario, imagine how seamlessly Dr. Sergio would have communicated the urgent need to be present at the hospital to each and every employee if he had a workforce optimization software in place.

This is where computer softwares and systems backed by artificial intelligence come in for the rescue. The biggest advantage of these workforce optimization systems is that they save immense amount of time which is spent on communicating with each and every employee; be it calling them in for emergencies, communicating shift in/out times, approving or rejecting leave requests, or checking the total working hours an employee has clocked in during the tough times.

An intelligent system has the ability to manage hospital schedules at multiple levels. It gives managers the power to send and broadcast messages to each and every staff member at once; ensuring correct information is passed on to every staff member at the same time.

As observed in major hospitals across the globe during the outbreak of COVID-19, the demand for hospital staff rose significantly overnight due to the exponential growth of cases worldwide. An intelligent scheduling software provides hospitals with the ability to automatically assign and notify staff members about their rest day, a day off or to show up for an urgent shift. And how does it do that? Managers have to simply update the current demands in the system and a near-optimal shift plan is automatically calculated.

5 Ways a Scheduling Software can Save Lives During Crisis

According to a leading study conducted to understand hospital staffing during pandemics, rural/regional hospitals demonstrated higher levels of clinical and non-clinical, (~86%) than metropolitan hospitals (~40%).

Even leading hospitals sometimes failed to carry out pandemic plans in exercises or drills, consequently undermining their effectiveness to take care of their patients. One-third of metropolitan hospitals and no rural/regional hospitals report not being able to meet patient needs with high levels of staff absenteeism and many of them still find it difficult to manage the staff attendance and schedule during the crisis period.

1. Rescinding and Rearranging approved Leaves

If an employee’s absence would disrupt the hospital’s operations during a pandemic period, There may be situations where a hospital needs to revoke an employees’ previously granted annual leave.

The management can almost immediately rescind those leaves from the workforce management software and automatically send push notifications to the concerned employees. The mobile first (native app) and responsive designs of the WFO software allow for access from any device; making it possible to reach out to the employees wherever they are. It is not common for management to make such decisions; most of the time the routine goes as planned and scheduled. But during bold times, one has to make bold decisions and that too proficiently. An AI- based scheduling software has all the data that it needs to match the right skillset with the right staff. The system is sentient enough to understand which roles are meant for which employees and it can help managers take the right decision at the right time.

2. Flexible Scheduling

During the time of a pandemic, hospitals have to review their normal business hours and employee’s work schedules in order to determine if they can be modified in a manner that best promotes social distancing, business continuity or other pandemic response goals. They also need to identify mission-critical functions that may be staffed with personnel on flexible work schedules. It includes, for instance, the staff performing administrative functions like payroll, benefits, accounting or purchasing etc..

Flexible work schedules can be requested, communicated, assigned and/or processed with immediate effect directly from the workforce optimization software and approved schedules do not need any manual documentation. If an employee makes a request for a flexible work schedule, the request can be denied or approved directly from the mobile app or web client.Flexible scheduling not only gives flexibility to the managers but also provides the ease and facility to the employees to be an integral part of that schedule.Staff members can bid for their most preferred shifts directly from the software using a unique points bidding system. They can choose to bid for their preferred shifts by allocating points to their requests which indicates how desired the requested shift change is.

This unique bidding system allocates the rosters fairly, promoting a content and adept workforce at the most necessary of times. Employees can see fairness and transparency in the system which further boosts their mettle and increases the likelihood of them adhering to their planned schedule.Lastly, managers do not have to regulate or assign shifts manually into the system. This removes the headache of manual scheduling from their daily routine and allows them to focus on more strategic initiatives such as dedicating more time for sick patients; naturally boosting patient care by creating specialized COVID-19 units and deploying them with immediate effect. Splitting the teams based on their speciality and experience can be done directly from the WFO software.

Leading workforce optimization softwares contain pre-designed templates where managers simply have to add the team members in the respective buckets according to their skillset. Rest assured that your schedules are optimized by the underlying AI Engine that ensures that you are neither understaffed or overstaffed.

3. Leave and Attendance Issues

Even during such pandemics, hospitals have to make sure that the process of documenting and recording attendance and leaves is done intricately so that overpayments and unpaid leave can be accounted for in a timely manner.

Global hospitals have been struggling to maintain a clear track of attendance and shift times after the onset of coronavirus. This is a type of pandemic not everyone is prepared for. Imagine a hospital which keeps a manual track of working hours, calculates overtime done by employees on a separate note, and then at the time of payroll, the accounts department has to coalesce those aspects to ensure fair pay.A resourceful software automates everything from top to bottom. From shift timings, overtime calculation to overtime payment, allowances and claims, everything is taken care of by the system. This puts more time in the hands of staff members to attend sick patients.The same is the case with leaves claim and staff availability.

Times of emergency may require maximum staff availability unless the employees are sick or not available due to dire situations.A scheduling software closely monitors the leave system and generated schedules in accordance with the demand.On a larger playground, automation and machine intelligence on this level can precisely contribute to the greater good and help save numerous lives.Supervisors, with access to real-time visibility in working hours, various staff attributes, employee skill sets, and with detailed insights granted by the software shift-patterns and balancing, can easily balance between included and excluded employees so that attendance and leave for staff who are out sick or quarantined can be recorded on a regular basis.

Majorly, a scheduling software can readily provide detailed sample analytics reports on time and attendance. With graphical insight and magnified judgement, managers can discern the loopholes and close them on time.

4. Demand Forecasting

The AI-powered software learns from ample amounts of data fed into it over time. With complex mathematical calculations and neural engines running under the hood, the WFO software can run predictive diagnostics on its own. This helps in predicting the future labour demands while balancing the well being of each and every employee.

A workforce optimization software in place can minimize a hospital’s overtime costs and prevent costly overstaffing practices during the period of a global pandemic. Not forecasting and predicting the staffing needs can prove costly both in terms of labour costs as well as in terms of patient care. Having more than the required number of employees present in the hospital increases the chance of virus spreading at a faster rate. This defeats the purpose of social distancing.

On the other hand, understaffing can be ghastly during these sensitive times.It is an indispensable aspect for hospitals to have adequate staff to manage their nurse-to- patient ratio and attend to those who are in critical need of care. With clever software, the organization can make sure they have an ideal number of staff members present to attend each and every patient, making sure they don’t have to wait and curing them before it is too late.The hospital management may also need to make strategic decisions during a pandemic.

Workforce Optimization software can provide iInteractive analytics which allows decision makers to gain meaningful insights from their data in real time.Looking at the bigger picture, a proper demand forecasting tool helps a hospital to construct and introduce work policies quickly. Each and every member of the hospital has to be initiated with new policies and make sure they are abreast with the effectiveness and adherence of them.In order to understand it better, let’s take a real-world example:A well-reputed hospital in Singapore decided to reschedule its staff shifts into two daily shifts of 12 hours each. Half of their employees worked from 6AM to 6PM and the other half worked from 6PM to 6AMthe next morning until the other shift reports back to work.

This wasn’t always the case with them; their shifts were spread across the entire day before the COVID-19 emergency broke out. In order to rapidly implement this policy and divide the shifts between employees, they used a scheduling software to get things done in a way that is most yielding, both in terms of productivity and time savings. The software helped them execute the policy promptly, sending necessary notifications to each of its healthcare professionals. This notification included a link to the new policy where they can read all the mentioned guidelines with the applicable claim codes.

5. Real-time Team Communication and Messaging

In the state of emergency and crisis, it becomes imperative for each and every member of a hospital to communicate effectively and to stay up-to-date about the latest events. A situation like this brings with it innumerable incidents which change quickly and are unprecedented. Updates and information are is required to reach all the levels of hierarchy with zero downtime and no interruptions.

With an automated workforce management software in place, hospitals can connect securely with anyone across any shift, duty or department. They can share documents & files across every team member, which may carry potentially life -saving information. With a broadcasting system in place, hospitals can keep their teams up-to-date by sending quick announcements to everyone at the same time.Just like well-ordered communication of the most recent updates and vital instructions is necessary between the employees, in the same manner it becomes equally important for the management to neatly communicate new work policies and codes.

This is where a scheduling system comes as a blessing in disguise. Once managers implement effective contracts into the system, the intelligent software automatically communicates the policy change with all the employees. Not only that, the software then auto-schedules the working hours for the concerned employees in a matter of a few minutes. The software also gauges the claims and settlement automatically based on the predefined policies, simplifying the work significantly. This provides transparency to the employees about the policies and communicates protocols in a crystal-clear manner.

End-Notes

As the saying goes – ‘A stitch in time, saves nine.’ – the world is currently facing a situation where time is everything. Every patient counts, every employee counts, and every breath counts. Time is of utmost importance when it comes to such critical situations and life-threatening diseases. Hospitals and medical organizations can succeed in this war against pandemics with the help from advanced technological features and software which can help them cut down on costs and time required elsewhere; which they could more importantly dedicate to patient care and crisis control.

The post 5 Ways Scheduling Software can Save Lives in Times of Crisis appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

How AI is a Game-Changer for Managing your Workforce

Alan — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 08:26:49 +0000

As industry becomes more complex, and staff requirements, flexible working arrangements and transient workforces change the ‘traditional’ workforce paradigms, companies are finding it increasingly challenging to adequately manage the needs of servicing customers, while also managing the bottom line.

Downward pressure on HR and management to lower labor costs, when coupled with the ever-fluctuating demands of business can often lead to shortages in staff, qualified operators, and in many instances, may lead to lost revenue.

However, like all industries, Artificial intelligence and the application of complex – and award-winning – mathematical formulas have the answer when it comes to the management of your workforce, reduction of downtime, reduction of management hours and increasing your bottom line.

Predict labor demand using AI

Labor demand can be challenging at the best of times, seasonality, unscheduled events, and depending on your industry, this can result in lost sales revenue, missed opportunities & appointments or even more serious implications should your organization be in medical services or a hospital.

While demand planners can apply the best methodologies and excel spreadsheets, they can’t provide the insights and applied Algorithms that AI has successfully enabled thanks to WorkForce Optimiser.

Case Study

When applied to the Acute Care Centre at the National University Hospital, they had the challenges of extensive work policies, procedures, and practices that needed to be managed. In addition, managing fairness in shirt assignments and leave requests. In a company with over 1250 beds, 70+ departments and 4000 staff, managing this is no mean feat.

However, through the application of the WorkForce Optimizer AI, they were able to successfully manage workforce, automate scheduling using mathematical techniques and planning tools, enjoy real-time tracking of attendance, automate claims processing and dynamic rescheduling of staff in case of unplanned events such as urgent or medical leave.

Through undertaking this process, the management team were able to effectively explore insights into labor data using advanced analytics, making informed and educated decisions not only on past data, but on forecast requirements.

What was the result?

From a staff point of view, they were able to become actively engaged and empowered in day-to-day management of staff rosters, through the innovative, real-time mobile app. Essentially allowing shift swaps with staff who meet the role specific requirements and meeting their shift related requests leaving staff happy, content at work not to mention more productive.

However, that was only the start, the NUH implemented a ‘bidding system’ allowing for staff to allocate their allotted points for changing shifts or requesting days off, rest day and even leave – again, putting the power back into their hands, and taking the burden of their managers.

The hospital realized a staggering 71% reduction in planning time, or 3,000 manager man-days saved in already the first year, which was previously allocated to the inefficient and antiquated management practices of the past in managing such complex requirements using spreadsheets. These also included the stamping out of subjective – often unilateral – management decisions, who may have favored one staff member over another, and compliance with the number of registered practitioners or staff of particular skill sets on the flood at any one time. (The solution ensured fairness while distributing shifts and managing staff requests. Something which was not possible using manual practices. Finally, the solution guaranteed compliance is being met when it comes to government and union regulations, as well as meeting organization specific requirements)

AI is changing the way we do business on so many levels; Siri and Alexa are changing how we find directions and order food, why should your workforce management system still be antiquated?

Speak to the team at WorkForce Optimizer today and realize real cost savings, an engaged workforce, and project delivery on time, every time.

The post How AI is a Game-Changer for Managing your Workforce appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Why You Need Employee Scheduling Software in Your Company?

Alan — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 08:00:19 +0000

Whether you are a small business owner or a big-time corporate manager, you may be indulged in a lot of multi-tasking. Especially when you are working to grow your business, your attention is required at multiple places at once, especially when you are the go-to person. Since time is limited, you must use it wisely to achieve your goals accordingly. It’s always fundamental to look for unique ways to optimize your everyday work processes. As a manager, employee scheduling can be a real hassle.

You have to update them about work hours, keep track of billable hours, maintain data sheets, make payrolls, and prepare invoices. Looking for an easier way to keep track of your employee schedules and say goodbye to traditional spreadsheets? Employee scheduling software is a platform designed to effectively manage employees and make the overall staff experience intuitive. With minimum or zero investment, the return on investment (ROI) is exceptionally high.

With that, let’s discuss why you need employee scheduling software in your company.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Employee Scheduling Software in Your Company

Payroll and Budgeting

Employee scheduling software helps you to save time while it handles your payroll processing and reduces the risk of costly payroll errors. The technology eliminates human error. For instance, a blunder of adding or subtracting an extra zero in invoices can cost businesses a lot. Payroll expenses are tremendously reduced, as the software will cover it for you. The software will automatically calculate and integrate with your systems to handle this task.

In every business, when payday arrives, everything usually becomes a total mess. You must do a lot in the given time, such as calculate the billable hours, check leaves and absences, calculate the salaries and a lot more. However, with employee scheduling software, this tiresome work will get easier with automatic payroll and budgeting features. Your workforce can focus on more essential tasks as the payments and invoices will be directly handled by the employee scheduling software.

Analytics and Reports

Reporting and analytical insights are essential for every business. It’s vital to look back and go through your insights to see how well you are performing. But it’s not an easy job. The work takes a lot of time and effort. You can organize employee schedules. Along with that, you can also generate extensive statistical reports such as desired shift patterns and coverage profiles.

Analytics and reports help your organization to make more informed decisions while introducing scheduling practices, training, hiring, and other HR activities. The insights can be generated easily using real-time analytics, improving your overall decision-making. You may also get accurate and insightful analysis quickly in a wide range of formats such as PDFs, HTML, Excel, and CSVs.

Supply Management

The software offers multiple tools to the business that they require to automatically find convenient substitutes for changing schedules based upon the staffs’ skill level such as different scheduled shifts and other availability. It allows the management to remain acknowledged about information and update the records accordingly for employee working hours, leaves, schedules, and claims. Managers will be informed immediately in case of a service shortage.

Staff scheduling and replacements can be done with a few clicks on software. Moreover, your employee scheduling software will automatically send email or SMS notifications to all the staff about any updates or whenever the shifts are changed.

Premium Security

One of the top qualities of employee scheduling software is the premium security it offers. The system uses SSL for full data encryption with 256-bit AES SSL encryption and authentication. Your data will be saved and stored with comprehensive compliance industry standards and multiple data centers. It also has an automatic failover to maintain business continuity and availability.

The software offers best practices to keep your mind at ease. You should opt for a security software as it won’t harm your organization’s data. Any of your data or files will never be shared with a third-party or any other source. The admin rights will only be given to the people you assign it to.

Requests and Availability

Employee scheduling software offers a unique bidding system. Your staff can log into the software using the employee scheduling app and make bids for their desired shifts by adding points to the request, in order to show its importance. This software helps to promote a happier and satisfied workforce. The entire system integrates with the HR department and helps to synchronize leaves and schedule work and you can improve your staff utilization.

Your staff can conveniently record their availability and unavailability easily through web and mobile applications. A software management updated rosters based upon these constraints. You can check the FinancesOnline employee scheduling software ranking to make more informed decisions.

Should You Invest in Employee Scheduling Software?

According to recent research, employee scheduling software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4% from 2019 to 2023. The market is expected to grow, and so will your business once you genuinely aim for it. Investing in an employee scheduling software will help you manage your employees and staff more effectively. By automating repetitive tasks, you and your team can focus on more important tasks.

It’s also essential to determine what your specific needs are. Bear in mind that the best software for scheduling is one that matches your unique business requirements.

The post Why You Need Employee Scheduling Software in Your Company? appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Fairness in work distribution

Alan — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 13:01:27 +0000

According to the International Labour Organisation, ILO Geneva, most nations have stipulated requirements for a weekly rest day. It is mostly Sundays or in some cases, a continuous rest period of 24 hours per week.

This is very straight forward for the human resources (HR) or management to convey to the employees if the business does not need to provide round the clock service. Industries such as food and beverage (F&B), hospitality (hotels and resorts), healthcare, data centres or telecommunications would need to ensure 24/7 service availability to consumers. How is operations manager (Ops) or human resource to ensure every single employee get the mandatory rest and keeps the business running? Ensuring that the work roster planned is fair with each having a fair chance for evening rest or weekend rest. Line managers have to keep track of seasonal demand and adjust manpower accordingly.

Coupled the above with the rise of casual workers in some sectors, it can be a constant logistic nightmare for those involved. Even if contractually, the workers have agreed to be flexible and accept the roster given to them. In the long run, without fair planning rules or leave application guidelines for weekends or preferred rest days, unhappiness would grow and snowball. High dissatisfaction among employees would lead to high attrition rate, it would also mean more time spent by the line manager in on-boarding, training and roster planning.

The universal guidelines in ensuring fairness and proper distribution of work rosters are:

Allowing employees preference for a rest day to be taken into consideration as far as possible
Each employee has a chance to have their preferences fulfilled, so there would be no biases perceived by them
The planned roster is distributed with enough time for employees and planning managers to interact
Allow fair swaps among employees through a seamless platform

A planner for a roster of above would probably have to keep track of various demands and requests in real-time and be able to multitask very well. At the end of a planned roster period, be able to tie in the overtime pay calculation, replacement leave for those being called back on standby, et cetera.

Casual worker and changes always complicate the planning process. An advanced system such as a software would be able to solve this more seamlessly and more fairly. Thus allowing line managers to spend time on improving the product, services provided or other value-adding activities instead of on attendance taking and shifts planning.

Why spend hours a week on generating roster when a roster planning software can do it for you in a few minutes?! Workforce Optimizer is such a software, it informs your managers if their staff are exceeding your organization’s business rules or government regulations, for work hours, schedules, holidays or claims. There is a mobile app that allows staff to post requests, swap shifts with colleagues that meet the shift-specific requirements. Our algorithm also considers business targets as well as ensures staff requests are dealt with in a fairer manner.

The post Fairness in work distribution appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Automate Allowance calculation

Alan — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 12:56:04 +0000

End of Financial Year (EFOY) is upon most of us and your business is likely now working on preparing tax filing. This time can be a stressful and busy time for those responsible. Working through your year of statements, checking exemptions, making certain to following existing and new rulings, etc. For Human Resource and Finance departments, it includes covering the companies’ responsibilities to their employees.

For some nations under their tax systems, an employee simply logs into their personal tax account and verifies the income data his employer sent to the government in advance. The employee reviews contact information; check for tax exemption or incentive they’re entitled too, clicks a box to claim a tax refund (if applicable), or set up tax payment instruction directly to their bank account. Voilà. Taxes are done, in less time than 10 minutes.

The mechanism behind this, personal income information is fed from the company to the government instead of the individual. So, those whose income is derived from a single employer would be able to file their taxes in a few minutes. However, the human resource and finance of these firms would have to sort the data accordingly.

They would have to work through income the employees derived as commission, over-time, awards or a benefit. Each is treated differently. They could start this tax preparation early. What if, over-time, commission or rewards calculation in the field or at the work-site is not regular? For some organization, it varies from month to month and based on different pay rules for different staff due to a different type of contracts offered. There could be thousands of such arrangements for some organizations. This is especially true for the service and professional sectors.

Going through the records by the human resource the finance can be tedious, copious and time-consuming. It is probably easy to have errors, which can be financially costly, in the case of overpaying; or staff morale may be affected in the case of underpaying.

An attendance and payroll rules integration system would make over-time payroll calculations easier and taxable income inclusion easier. A software solution such as Workforce Optimizer can help you to save payroll processing time and significantly reduce the risk of costly payroll errors. Cost savings estimation from reducing payroll expenses by 2-4% through reduced overtime expenses, staffing overcapacity and payroll errors.

In addition, the manager’s productivity is improved with reduced time spent on managing the workforce. The time reduction is about 70-80%. Staff productivity also improved as a result of transparency in their rewards to contribution. Time, attendance recording, and additional work pay calculation are all automated. Together these advantages lead to operational excellence and consistent customer experience across the enterprise, leading to a rapid payback.

The post Automate Allowance calculation appeared first on Workforce Optimizer.

Workforce Optimizer

3 Things I learned During my First Year at Workforce Optimizer

Remote onboarding can be challenging but is certainly not impossible

Most organizations are using extremely outdated workforce management tools – and often have valid reasons for doing so

The perfect roster (usually) does not exist

Using AI-Enabled Workforce Analytics and AI Scheduling to Combat COVID-19

Fighting COVID-19 with AI-Enabled Workforce Analytics

Workforce Tracking + Analytics

Dynamic Rescheduling

Demand Drivers in the Retail Industry and How to Capitalize on them

(Source: File:Simcard Vending Machine.JPG. (2012, September 29). File:Simcard Vending Machine.JPG. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simcard_Vending_Machine.JPG)

What are Demand Drivers?

The above chart visualizes the concept of price elasticity for hamburger and hotdog sales.

(Source:AsiaOne. (2019, September 19). AsiaOne iPhone Queue. AsiaOne IPhone Queue. https://www.asiaone.com/sites/default/files/styles/a1_og_image/public/original_images/Sep2019/190919_iphonequeue2_Facebook.jpg?itok=R8hP8O1Q)

(Source:Rensi, E. (2018, July 11). McDonald’s Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds-says-goodbye-cashiers-hello-kiosks/#13eedc476f14)

How to capitalize on demand drivers?

(Source:Bhaarath, V. (2020, May 5). Time Series Forecasting – Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine. Medium. https://becominghuman.ai/time-series-forecasting-7ac3344a8588?gi=1aa0b60c2f5d)

(Source:Jackson, B. (2019, February 22). Single Post. Brittany Jackson. https://brittaniaten.wixsite.com/brittanyjackson/single-post/2017/12/19/Wal-marts-Expansion-Their-North-and-South-American-Success-and-German-Failure)

Conclusion

How Fixed Shift Patterns are costing your organization money

What are fixed shift patterns?

Why do organizations use fixed shift patterns?

The pitfalls of fixed shift patterns

The alternative: Dynamic, AI-Enabled scheduling

The best of both worlds? A hybrid approach

Conclusion

How a Time and Attendance Software Can Help the Healthcare Sector During the COVID-19 Crisis

So, why healthcare?

The Current State of Global Healthcare

Challenges Faced by Hospitals

Challenge #1:- Hospital Compliance and Adherence to Rules

The Solution

Challenge #2:- High-Fidelity Employee Tracing

The Solution

Benefits of Time & Attendance Systems in the Healthcare sector

1. Creating a secure attendance system

2. Improving the overall quality of patient care and employee care

3. Accurate payroll processing

Conclusion

5 Ways Scheduling Software can Save Lives in Times of Crisis

Real World Scenario

The Problem

Staffing Appropriately at the Time of Pandemic

5 Ways a Scheduling Software can Save Lives During Crisis

1. Rescinding and Rearranging approved Leaves

2. Flexible Scheduling

3. Leave and Attendance Issues

4. Demand Forecasting

5. Real-time Team Communication and Messaging

End-Notes

How AI is a Game-Changer for Managing your Workforce

Predict labor demand using AI

Why You Need Employee Scheduling Software in Your Company?

Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Employee Scheduling Software in Your Company

Payroll and Budgeting

Analytics and Reports

Supply Management

Premium Security

Requests and Availability

Should You Invest in Employee Scheduling Software?

Fairness in work distribution

Automate Allowance calculation