Isabella Longobardi

Workforce Planning and Scheduling Isabella Longobardi

Scheduling staff shifts is a difficult task. In organizations that work on Sundays, and/or on public holidays, and/or during night hours, scheduling shifts accurately and efficiently is a time consuming job, and it also exposes employers to the risk of excessive overtime costs and poor distribution of workload among employees. In order to be efficient, anyone who has the task of planning the activities of an organization must learn to perform two activities that are interconnected but distinct: first, he must learn to represent the data specific to his organization's problem in an organized manner, ideally resolving the matter manually, with pen and paper; then, he must learn to use a software dedicated to the problem of shift scheduling. This book teaches how to address the problem of allocating tasks systematically, and also teaches how to use a dedicated software program to achieve this purpose without wasting time with repetitive tasks in search of the best organizational solution, operations that can be performed by a computer. Thus, in this book we will first discuss the data analysis of the problem that needs to be addressed before making use of any software tool. We will then proceed by giving examples and referring to one of the most efficient and cheap software solutions available on the market: ZonaTEAM, produced by Zonabit Sistemi. Attentive readers of this book will become experts in planning, and will acquire the ability to plan with full and rational use of available human resources, saving in overtime costs, all the while providing fair treatment of employees.