Define the requirements for each employee - How many employees must be present in given time periods you define:
for each day of the week and holidays
for exceptional days such as inventories
Express all the necessary requirements (and constraints) regarding staff composition, as dictated by the demands of the operation of your organisation.
When listing time periods,---and staff-requirements for each period---you may follow any one, of the two possible approaches that WoShi furnishes.
Either:
State demand for employees from the reference frame of shifts by assigning required numbers of employees to the shifts you are using.
The second option is to assign employees not to shifts, but to time periods dictated by the fluctuations in the operational demands of the operation of your organisation. Should you resort to this option, be aware that these artificial time periods need to be serviced by actual employees; employees who enter and leave their posts according to the more stable (from the individual employee's perspective) rhythm dictated by shifts.Therefore, you must be sure to always maintain consistency between periods and shifts, whenever you resort to expressing demand for employees by way of periods.
You may access either of the above described methods in the process of stating schedule requirements at any time, which means that you can switch to whichever one better fits the scheduling task at hand---as there can occur numerous different situations even within a single schedule, such as the following---:
All days of the week, each of which can be different in terms of operation.
Holidays
For exceptional days such as---for example---inventories.
Importantly also for each skill-set, as employee-demand takes into account the skills of available employees.
Only when ALL the fields marked with a red asterisk (*) are appropriately filled-out, are the statements complete and internally consistent!
The image below demonstrates the by-shifts method of entering staff-composition requirements. Remember that you may switch to the by-period method, (second image below) at any time you like. When you switch from one to another, Woshi automatically converts between formats in which employee counts and time-durations are listed (while of course maintaining all numerical values).
Note that the elements inside the red-colored box only appear if you have skill-differentiation between employees enabled; otherwise employees are listed there by name.
Below is the image of the aforementioned by-period mode:
Example:
During the week, 1 employee must be present between 7 am and 9 am, 2 employees between 9 am and 1 pm, 1 employee between 1 pm and 4 pm and 2 employees between 4 pm and 8 pm. For weekends and holidays, from 2 to 3 employees between 9 am and 1 pm, 1 employee between 1 pm and 4 pm and 3 employees between 4 pm and 8 pm. On the 4th of May, one employee must be present between 1 pm and 8 pm.
Make sure that the number of employees is in sync with shifts. If no shift either begins or ends at the hour at which you changed the number of required employees, the program will be unable find a proper solution due to incompatible input data. In the example above, you have to have defined a shift beginning at 9 am. If you haven't, you will have to go back to the "Master data" > "shifts" page (accessible through the menu bar at the top of the screen) and add a new shift.
The following data are required:
All the company working days must have entered records
number of employees - if the To field is empty, then it is assumed to be the same as the from field
both fields defining duration (from-to)
if the value in the "from" field is smaller than the "to" field, it means the period ends on that hour of the next day
if there are multiple periods in a single day, they must not overlap. If the first period lasts from 8am until noon, the second must begin at noon, and the third must begin where the second one ends, except if you want periods without employees, in which case the third and second period may begin at any time after the end of the second and first respectively.
The same goes for holidays. Each day must only be defined once.
Example of a 24-hour workday(image below):
The first period is from midnight to 6 am. It will be covered by the night shift, which started on the previous day (from 10 pm to 6 am).
The last period is from 10 pm to midnight. It will be covered by the night shift from 10pm to 7am on the following day.
The last period could also be defined from 11pm to 7am, however, complications can occur at transitions between days (In this case from Friday to Saturday and from Sunday to Monday).
Highlighted fields signify a possible error, since the value in the "to" field is smaller than the value in the "from" field. In the below example, it's a false alarm, as midnight is indeed after 10 pm.
Since the schedule begins on the first of May, and there is no preceding schedule, and the first shift doesn't begin until 6 am; an additional period must be defined, so that one employee must be present from 7 am to midnight.
Presence of employees in the workplace, requested by skill-designations.
The column circled in red on the image below, will only be interjected into the form when you are managing a skill-differentiated work force and have the Worker skills option enabled(set to true). The skills column, which has replaced the workers-by-name column, will now allow you to specify how many workers you need - by required skill-set instead of the previous method which was picking individuals by name one-by-one -. If, on the other hand, you have Worker skills disabled(you do not require WoShi to differentiate your employees by their individual skill-sets), then the drop-down menus in the second column will contain employees by name, as discussed previously.
In the example that is captured in the image above, business hours run through all 24 hours of the day:
The entry "00:00 to 00:00", means that business hours require the presence of employees during all 24 hours of the day.
From the standpoint of Worker skills, there is call for 1 doctor for the entire duration of the day, and for 2 nurses in the morning+early afternoon, but only 1 nurse in the late afternoon+evening.
The same request would also be expressed, if you entered "from 15:00 to 07:00". Please be aware, however, that if you decide to resort to this alternative, you will be in danger of running into some issues at the borderline cases (in this case, on the night between Friday and Saturday, and also on the night between Sunday and Monday). This applies especially to the schedules that have different time spans of shifts during weekends, then they do Monday-to-Friday.