Using a rostering engine to resolve rostering system and employee scheduling problems benefits an organisation in several ways:
Cost benefits. Employee salaries are a significant proportion of expenditure for some organisations. Better scheduling can reduce this expense:
Through minimising over coverage (not assigning more employees than are required at any time).
Via cutting the reliance on expensive, short notice employees to fill gaps in schedules when it could appear to be the one solution.
Through increased work performance due to reduced fatigue and stress amongst personnel caused by poor scheduling (e.g. overwork, insufficient rest, bad shift combinations etc).
Higher staff retention and a recruiting aid. In the healthcare industry for example, lots of countries have experienced a decrease in the quantity of folks training to become nurses and/or a rise in the number of nurses leaving the profession. As the populations of the countries age, the demand for healthcare increase and these nurse shortage problems will become more acute.
In order to encourage more folks to be nurses also to decrease the number of individuals leaving the nursing profession, various initiatives have been proposed. Among these is to permit more in your free time contracts and supply the nurses with an increase of versatility and input on when they work. This enables, for example, more parents with small children to stay in nursing.
Decrease in absenteeism and tardiness. Many organisations incur a reduction in productivity due to staff absenteeism and tardiness. The reason why for personnel arriving late or taking days off are various. This can partly be attributed, though, to dissatisfaction using their schedules or fatigue due to poor scheduling. This is reduced through better rostering and giving the employees more say in their work patterns. For example, an employee is less inclined to be absent for a shift that they actually requested.
Personal preferences. Increasing the employees' satisfaction using their schedules by providing them with an increase of choice and allowing them to better plan and use their free time may also greatly increase general morale levels. This, in turn, can result in benefits such as higher productivity and lower staff turnover using its associated costs.
Increased quality of service. As another example from the healthcare industry, nurses have the ability to spend more time with patients if they're not overworked or the ward/department is not understaffed therefore of poor scheduling. In the worst case, fatigue and stress can lead to medical error endangering the patient's health insurance and safety and damaging the hospital's reputation.
Constructing high quality rosters, however, is a challenging process which is made more difficult by providing increased flexibility and a number of work contracts. In lots of organisations (including the ones that do use workforce management software) the schedules are still made by hand and it is an unwelcome and frustrating assignment. The duty may also be stressful and frustrating. The planner is presented with a number of requests and scheduling requirements which can rarely be fully satisfied. They must ensure that all legal and binding rules are obeyed whilst endeavoring to grant as many requests as you can. Often, unfavourable shifts must be assigned and requests denied whilst trying to keep up fairness and impartiality.
