A software solution for your weekly scheduling headache

Setting up the weekly work schedule is a task all of us try to avoid. It’s a job that generally gets passed around until someone is found who is obsessive enough, or unlucky enough, to deal with it. In some security protection companies, the job is farmed out to the site supervisors. In others, the office manager gets stuck with it. Some security companies actually hire a dedicated employee to do the scheduling. The reality is that the operations manager should be the one directly responsible for the employee schedule.

Why the operations manager? This is the person who has the biggest impact on a company’s profitability. This employee has to know every detail of who is working where and what that employee is costing the company. Employee costs are the biggest expense a security company has to deal with. It is a “people product”, labor intensive industry. A contract security company dealing with multiple sites, and site requirements, can live or die from just this one expense. The more hours you have under contract, the bigger this weekly headache becomes.

Snap Schedule is a powerful, yet low cost software package that can end this weekly headache. You only have to enter background data on employees or clients into the program once. Once the data is programmed into the database the drag-and-drop function makes scheduling quick and easy.
On the front end it allows the operations manager to easily schedule employees. The graphical interface allows the manager to “see” specific employees as slots are filled. Employee skills and warnings you put into the data base allow square pegs to be fit into square holes.

The program will even warn you of potential overtime problems. This is especially important when you have to make a substitution when a scheduled employee calls time-off on short notice. This is generally where companies incur needless non-billable overtime. The tendency is to plug in the first warm living body you can find to fill that hole. Snap Schedule scheduling software will show you which employees, with the needed skills, and less than 40 hours on the clock, are available. The operations manager doesn’t even need to be involved. Snap Schedule makes it simple enough that the shift supervisor or even the dispatcher can handle getting a fill-in.

Let’s not forget the reports function as a part of scheduling. A commonly used report function is just printing out the employee’s schedule. A lot of mistakes have been made transferring data from the schedule spreadsheet to the schedule document posted on the squad room wall. Snap Schedule can take the same data and print it out as a master schedule, shift or site schedule, or even as an individual schedule. What’s really awesome is that these schedules can then be e-mailed to supervisors and even the individual employee. The old excuse of “I didn’t see the new schedule” won’t work when you have “read receipt” from Outlook!

Snap Schedule is the program you need to take control of your schedule instead of finding someone you can pass this headache on to.