Schedule setup for manufacturing operations with rotating positions

“I have employees who must rotate around various job positions and work areas (locations). How do I go about setting up their work schedules and find out if I have adequate shift coverage?”

This article will explain how to set up your employee work schedules using Snap Schedule. If you have employees who work in many different positions at various locations in your organization, you first define the work locations in Snap Schedule and who are authorized to work at each location. Then you create the shifts which will be used to represent the job responsibilities at each location. To create the work schedule, simply select the employees and assign them to the appropriate shifts. Snap Schedule will warn you if an employee is not authorized to work at a particular shift or location. To find out if you have adequate shift coverage, use the Shift Coverage Planner.

Let’s walk through an example for a sawmill operation.

We’ll first want to create an individual location for each responsibility so that we can authorize employees to perform certain job responsibilities. However, if all of your employees can perform all of the various responsibilities, then there’s no need to create these separate locations. Under the Manage tab, click on the Locations button in the top ribbon. After clicking on the “Create a New Shift Location” link, fill out the blank location form with the job responsibility information.

After creating locations and authorizing your employees, we’ll now need to create the shifts for the same job position. Click on the Shifts button in the top ribbon and then click on the “Create a new Shift” link to open a blank shift form. Create shifts for each job responsibility that you have and set the location field for the corresponding shift location.

If you have multiple shifts throughout the day, you need to create a separate shift for each shift time for each of the job responsibilities.

After creating shifts, under the Schedule tab click on the arrow underneath the Daily View button in the top ribbon and select Daily View by Shift. You’ll now see the shifts you’ve created on the left column of the schedule view. You can now drag-and-drop employees to assign employees to these shifts for each day of the week. You can also customize the view by using the Sort and Filter options located just above the schedule view.

The Shift View is another variation of the Daily View by Shift, but also adds another helpful feature. In the Shift Coverage Planner at the bottom of the Shift View you can enter requirements for how many employees you need for each shift. In this example, we’re showing just one job position in Snap Schedule so that you can easily see whether the shift schedule meets your demand. Obviously if you have other employee positions, you can definitely add those as well. The data from this Shift Coverage Planner can also be viewed in a graphical format in the Schedule Outlook if that view better meets your needs.

With this schedule configuration you can now easily move employees between responsibilities without having the limitations of the employee only being assigned one position. This also allows you to use the Shift Coverage Planner to ensure that all of your demands are met for having enough employees scheduled for each shift.