Adapting a pre-designed plan for two 8-hour shifts, 7 days a week work schedule

“Our company requires a schedule that operates 7 days a week, 2 shifts (days 6 am to 2 pm., afternoons 2 pm. to 10 pm). We have 6 full time employees and would like to schedule at least two persons per shift. Can you help us figure out a schedule?”

To schedule at least two persons on each 8-hour shift, we’ll need a daily coverage of 32 hours (2 persons per shift x 2 shifts x 8 hours) or a weekly coverage of 224 hours (7 days x 32 hours/day). To meet this coverage requirement, we’ll need at least 5.6 full-time-equivalent persons ((224 hours/ 40 hours), each one working 40 hours per week. If we organize the 6 full time employees into three two-person teams, we can select a days on/off pattern so that on any given day, two teams will be working while the remaining team will be off.

Instead of designing a schedule plan from scratch, let’s look at pre-designed schedule plans to see if any of the 3-team, 2-shift plans can be used as a starting point. Let’s say we like the DDNNOO plan the best because it rotates employees between shifts, thus providing a balance of expertise. It is very simple to adapt this plan to work for our situation. First, we create a Snap Schedule file based on the DDNNOO plan, change the 12-hour shifts to 8 hour, then use the Generate Schedule wizard to automatically create employee schedules as shown below.

• From the Getting Started screen, select the DDNNOO plan from the list to create a new schedule file based on the selected plan. Follow the on-screen instructions to enter the two employee positions for each team. When specifying the schedule dates, enter 0 in the Number of cycles to generate field to skip generating shift assignments at the completion of schedule file creation.
• On the Manage tab, click on the Shifts button to modify the shifts from 12 hours to 8 hours. When completed, there should be two shifts as shown below.
  
• The schedule file now has the schedule plan tailored for this operation. Additional employee attributes and work schedule preferences can be entered.
• To generate employee schedules from this plan, click on the Generate Schedule button and follow the on-screen instructions. Once completed, review the schedule assignments and make adjustments as required. Use Snap Schedule to manage vacations, holidays, time offs, and to print and distribute schedules.
  

Click here to download the schedule file (2.5 MB) for this example. Once downloaded, use Snap Schedule to open the file and make changes as required.