After successfully getting buy-in from corporate to invest in an automated, cloud-based scheduling solution, you’re the hero of your Operations department. Efficiencies have been improved, savings have been maximized, and your organization no longer struggles with compliance to ever-changing labor laws.
Now you’re looking to change something.
Perhaps you want to change your shift schedules from 12 hours to 8 hours to reduce fatigue. Or maybe you want to change a work rule, such as more stringent qualification criteria for a particular job.
If you decide to test those ideas live, you run the risk of making a mistake thataffects everyone in real-time. That’s where sandbox environments come in.
Indeavor’s cloud-based capabilities allow you to make a copy of your production environment so you can conduct tests in it. So, you can play around with different types of shift schedules or one-off scenarios—without the permanency.
Test environments aren’t just for software developers. Here are three benefits schedulers and shift planners can reap if they use our Sandbox Environment Module.
Be Proactive
What if you could prevent undesirable outcomes before they happen? With real-time employee data to play around with in your testing environment, you can!
This allows you to scenario test and forecast seamlessly. Let’s use the example of a product launch that is happening next quarter. You already know that more manpower is necessary to prepare for the big day. Do you have enough qualified workers for each job, or is it time to hire more? If you don’t hire more, how much overtime will your current labor pool be putting in? By simulating that scenario with your current qualified workers, you’ll have a much better answer to those questions and be more prepared.
And by having the right labor metrics available at the right time, you can uncover cost-saving opportunities in unexpected places. Using the product launch example again, you may find that it would actually be more cost-effective to hire a few more employees!
Save Effort
There’s nothing worse than making a change and realizing that, whoops, you need to undo it. When the change is made live, you can’t simply “erase” what you did with the click of a button.
With a sandbox environment, you can manipulate large amounts of data in minutes. By double-checking before you make a system-wide change, you mitigate the risk of not only mistakes, but extra work on your part.
If you don’t like the way the new shift schedules look in your test environment, you can simply leave it! If only every other part of your job was that easy.
Keep Your Organization Agile
Perhaps the biggest benefit a sandbox environment like ours can provide is its inherent ability to be dynamic. Your shift-based environment constantly changes… so being able to simulate a change in the way you generate shifts in a worry-free environment is critical.
Have a sudden change in demand? Create a risk-free simulation that doesn’t disrupt the status quo of your current shift schedules. Need to get internal buy-in for any major change proposals? Run a demo.
You have a tool that can automatically generate a schedule with a click of a button, putting employees into jobs based on a lot of different criteria (demands, employees, qualifications, preferences, shifts, jobs, etc).
You need a testing tool to match.
The Indeavor Solution
Click here to request a demo.
Workloud is our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. Workloud integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
