FAQ

How do I ensure seamless transitions between schedules?

You have two options:

• • Move the starting date of the schedule back a few days. Enter those extra days as "Mandatory days" in the "Mandatory and forbidden days" section of the "New schedule" input form and tick the box under "Mandatory" (See the "Additional days" section of this manual). If your new schedule is between the 1.5. and the 31.8., change 1.5. to 25.4. (five days back). The idea is simply to copy some of the last days on the old schedule, onto the first days of the new schedule.This enables the artificial intelligence to "fuse" the two schedules into one seamless schedule.

  • You also achieve the same result by manually setting the shifts of the first few days on the new schedule, again using the "Mandatory and forbidden days", so that they continue the old schedule.

Additional days - (check Mandatory field)

Examples for the section of Presence

You want to mandate that a certain employee is to have at least 1 guaranteed free Saturday, or perhaps that he is to have 1 guaranteed Saturday on-duty (or both). You have two alternatives to express this:

• • Have the employee always be excluded from shifts that both start and end on a Saturday.

    • By choosing the following options: Works-YES; When-from 00:00 to 00:00; and How-IN

  • or:

  • The employee is to work no such shifts, as would in any way include any number of hours, on any of the Sundays on the schedule.

    • By choosing: Works - NO, When - from 00:00 to 00:00 and How - BETWEEN

If you want the employee on-duty that day, select Works-YES.

You would like to exclude a certain employee from a certain shift, or you would like to make sure that he works precisely that shift:

• • You want a particular employee to work at a certain date from 8 to 12.

    • Select the following: Works - YES, When - from 08:00 to 12:00 and How - EXACTLY.

    • Please note, that when you use EXACTLY, you are referring to a shift with the exact duration that is in the FROM-TO fields, therefore only if the the 8 - 12 shift exists in the Master Data, will WoShi be able to ensure that, - on the specified date - the employee in question will work on precisely those hours and no others. If the shift is not in the Master Data, WoShi will return an inconsistency error. Always add all the shifts in the Shifts section, before you refer to them in the Period presence section.

  • A certain employee is to be excluded from the 08 to 12 shift on a certain day.

    • Select the following options: Works - NO, When - from 08:00 to 12:00 and How - BETWEEN.

    • BETWEEN excludes all shifts for the given worker that touch the duration of the specified period, thus allowing only entirely outside laying shifts for that employee.

An employee called in sick, how do I adjust the schedule accordingly?

In cases where the new schedule is not yet in use, (The first day on the new schedule hasn't yet arrived) you may simply alter the constraints, then submit the scheduling problem to WoShi for automatic solving.

It is another matter, when the schedule is already in use by your staff. If that is the case, freeze the entire schedule up to the day on which the sick-leave is to begin. Also freeze the entire schedule for those employees whose schedules you can't afford to have skewed by the newly arrived circumstance (the sick-leave for one of your employees). Next, change any other requirements and criteria that you would like to have different from now on. These, of course, will have no bearing on the sections of the schedule that you had frozen. Finally, submit this newly revised scheduling problem to the solver algorithm, which will compose a new schedule, while leaving all the frozen sections intact.

The initial freezing of the schedule will first see the existing schedule saved to archives, but only on the first go. All changes to the schedule requirements that you might subsequently add, will still refer to the same archived schedule for information about what was going on in the period, prior to the introduction of the new circumstance (The sick-leave). Of course, should another special circumstance arise 10 days later, you will of course need to follow the following sequence to update the previous period:

• • Enter edit mode for the schedule result.

  • Cancel the freeze that you instituted the last time.

  • Save the schedule (Make sure, however, not to run the solver algorithm on the schedule, since that would alter the schedule, and that is precisely the thing you do not want to happen in this particular situation.)

  • Repeat the process of freezing the sections of the schedule that you want to keep as they are.

  • At this point, save the schedule, and the current schedule result will be saved to archives. Where it will serve as the original version from now on.

You also achieve the same outcome if you do not remove the freeze, but instead simply change it where necessary, and keep as they are, those sections that need not change. This way, not only will you avoid juggling a temporarily unfrozen version, but you may in some cases also save some time.

• • Enter manually edit mode for the schedule and make Save

  • Next, enter edit mode on the schedule's constraints and requirements form.

  • Once there, change the span of the frozen section as you wish.

  • Finally, save the schedule. (The current state of the schedule will be archived, and the new schedule - the one that includes the sick-leave for one of your employees -, will be assembled while taking into account the sections that you had frozen.)

I have made a manual change. How do I get WoShi to recalculate the schedule, but keep the manual change intact?

A manual change freezes all workers for the entire schedule time. Still it allows additional manual changes, like moving shifts, adding new shifts and deleting some of them. Manual changes are allowed for the entire schedule period. For example swap two workers' shifts.

Whenever we use manual change, the result is saved to the archive and gets a special status. We can make more than one change in a row, but only the situation before the first manual change is archived. The default schedule is always the last one and not the archived one. Which is different to the schedule-freezing.

In case we want to recalculate some period, we go by edit in which we change the frozen items as we wish to, and then we run the recalculation. A copy version is highly recommended (preserving the original for comparison).

How can I save the state of a schedule?

Once you are sufficiently satisfied with the schedule, and decide to submit it, to be used by your employees, you should first stop the automatic scheduling process, and then immediately lock away the current state of the schedule, by selecting the "Lock" option in the drop-down menu, on the button-box next to the schedule.

You may decide to send the schedule to the archives whenever you wish. Normally, you will do so when the period for which it serves has expired, and it is no longer in use. You may view and export schedule data from the archives also.

It might be best if you never delete archived schedules at all. If you do accidentally delete from the archives, a schedule that you still needed, immediately ask the site administrator to recover it for you. (As that will only be possible for a limited duration.)

What if I want to try more than one version of the same schedule

Set up the first version of any schedule by entering your requirements, and allow WoShi to assemble your schedule, based on the specified requirements. If you need additional versions of your schedule, with slightly different requirements and specifications, simply copy existing schedule that you wish to create additional versions for, and rename the schedule.

Now you can edit the copied version and create an alternative setup for your schedule. You may, of course, create as many versions of a schedule as you want and run them as separate and independent instances.

Insuring that employees get assigned posts, that correspond to their primary skill-sets. Or in other words: How do I ensure that WoShi will not unnecessarily assign to my employees, replacement roles for which they are over-, or worse, under-qualified?

Consider the following scenario: Your organisation employs both nursing assistants (nurse for short) and medical assistants (medic for short). In certain situations, you allow your nurses to step in when you have a shortage of available medics. E. g. there is a Sunday 7-19 shift, during which you require the presence of 3 medics. Since you allow nurses to step in for medics, it could happen that WoShi will one day create a schedule in which one of the Sunday shifts is filled with 3 nurses, and 0 professional medics(!). In order to stop this from happening, you will essentially need to demand, that at least one medic - from among the ones that are to work the shift under discussion -, be a person with the exact requisite training. This will ensure that there is always at least one individual present, who can take on the responsibilities, of either instructing the rest on - or simply exclusively attending to - those tasks of a medic, which require the most technical skill.

The way to achieving this, is as simple as entering another skill-set in the Skills section of Master Data. You will call this new skill-set, for instance, "MedicA". Next, you will assign this new skill-set to only the medics of your organisation, and you will do so in the Worker skills section of Master Data. Finally, you will go to the New schedule->Basic->Number-of-workers section of the New schedule input form. There, you will revise the entries in the following fashion: Replace all the instances of call for "Medic" to instances of call for X number of "MedicA"(Only actual medics qualify...), plus Y number of "Medic"(...Both medics and nurses qualify to fill this type of position.). Thus, you are finished. WoShi will henceforth make sure to always include at least as many "real" medics into any staff, as you demanded.