Labor scheduling optimization software can help reduce unnecessary costs and improve productivity across your entire enterprise. Here’s how.
Streamline Processes & Control Labor Costs
No matter where sites are located, having one centralized labor management platform like Indeavor can help organizations increase efficiencies enterprise-wide. There are some cascading cost-saving effects, including:
(Fairly) controlled staffing
There are many factors behind overstaffing. A lack of real-time analytics means that there is a lack of scheduling visibility into over and under-staffing. Relying on manual paper processes is an additional detriment, as it increases the reliance on a plug-and-play method of scheduling that puts employees in roles based on availability and fails to keep production demands in mind.
Providing a modern tool with analytics to demand planners and schedulers alike can ensure they’re always in unison and working off of the same information. When this is done, every role is held accountable for their piece of the puzzle.
Your lack of transparency could also be to blame. If schedulers and supervisors can’t keep track of how many people are requesting time off or volunteering for overtime, and if they do not communicate with each other, they could be saying yes to everyone, leading to unnecessary excess labor costs.
With scheduling optimization software, you can ensure that all locations are staffed to match only what they need—during both peak and off-peak times. No more paying idle workers. Instead, with scheduling software, you can easily find productive work for them. Real-time employee data can help pinpoint facilities and locations that are consistently overstaffed. Alternatively, you’ll also know when it’s time to hire temp workers, recruit new full-time employees, or distribute overtime to keep up with increased demand.
Eliminated unnecessary overtime
Do you know how much overtime your employees receive, on average? What about how much of it was actually needed? 27% of overtime costs are considered to be unbudgeted by organizations behind on automation.
When unchecked, overtime budgets can be exceeded by hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Besides the organization hemorrhaging all that money, the employees are risking fatigue and putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations. Those operating heavy machinery at a plant, driving on the highway, or operating rail cars should not be putting in unchecked hours unnecessarily. You need a fair distribution policy that still controls spending.
Fair distribution should follow union contract stipulations and allocate the OT opportunities evenly across your labor pool. With Indeavor, weekly schedules will always sync up with production demand, allowing the input of restrictions based on specific needs to prevent unnecessary overtime; each employee gets assessed by these rules as the schedule generates. Overtime for each employee is automatically logged, so management has a centralized system of record to either settle employee grievances or make sure someone doesn’t exceed a safe number of hours.
Reduced scheduling errors
If the current process for putting in OT and vacation requests is paper forms or email messages, there is little to no transparency to the rest of the team. Supervisors can forget that they approved a vacation request and schedule that employee for a shift during that time, resulting in scheduling gaps that need to be made up with forced overtime.
With Indeavor’s cloud-based software that hosts all employee and facility data in one place, schedules, and schedule changes are communicated effortlessly. Everyone from the scheduler to front-line management knows where each employee is and when to reduce the risk of costly scheduling errors.
Efficiently Manage & Adhere to Various Regulations
Juggling complex scheduling rules with complex compliance coverage will be a headache of the past. Configurable compliance rules, workflows, and reports help manage and mitigate compliance concerns around fatigue regulations, industry-standard best practices, federal and state work laws, and union rules.
Since the scheduling rules can be changed on a site-by-site basis to adapt to different country’s unique labor laws, your organization will consistently avoid fines and employee grievances across the globe. While the shift schedule will automatically generate based on your pre-set compliance rules, manual schedule creation and modification can be utilized when necessary. Schedulers are alerted when they violate a rule and are either given a chance to back out or adjust to remain compliant, or they can complete a waiver form as needed.
With the ability to audit every keystroke (e.g. when a supervisor modifies an employee’s scheduled assignment), you have a centralized system of record that makes pulling reports simple. Projection reporting has never been more important, so being about to track things like absence and qualification data will help schedulers make more informed decisions.
Qualification data is particularly important for compliance. A public safety agency had culminated nearly $10 million in fines for assigning unqualified employees to specific positions due to a lack of proper records and controls. Ensure that positions are not being filled by uncertified employees, saving you both fines and productivity woes.
Seamlessly Integrate with Other Enterprise Systems
When implementing a new employee scheduling and absence management tool, it should not 1) be disconnected from your other systems and 2) require a complete overhaul of your current systems and data. To achieve true enterprise-wide labor optimization, Indeavor integrates with your current HCM, ERP, LMS, and T&A systems. This makes all your robust labor data easy to interpret and act upon.
Labor demands from your ERP system, employee demographics data from your HCM system, skills and certifications from your LMS, and leave balances from your T&A and payroll systems get fed into Indeavor. This way, the software has the up-to-date information necessary to generate the most optimal schedule. To create a feedback loop of interconnected data, Indeavor exports the real-time schedules to T&A and payroll to ensure that the right people get paid for the right time worked.
Easily Implement New Scheduling Strategies & Policies
There should always be room for improvement, which is why Indeavor is not a “set it and forget it” solution. Our team works with you from the beginning to evaluate your current workflows for inefficiencies and opportunities to improve, and this is an ever-evolving process.
If something is no longer working for your organization or the status quo gets disrupted (e.g. moving from 8-hour schedules to 12 to limit employee interactions due to COVID), our team will work with you to implement new scheduling algorithms.
After all, aligning your people with your technology is a key element of agile enterprises. According to Enterprise Acceleration theory, you need to be leveraging best-of-breed tools for specific problems, allowing more customization based on interdepartmental needs.
The Indeavor Solution
Interested in an optimized labor management solution specific to your organizational needs, allowing immediate and sustained value for your enterprise?
Click here to request a demo.
Indeavor’s solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling and workforce management system. By integrating with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems, you can leverage a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data. Relieve your supervisors of manual tasks and the constant mental fatigue brought upon by scheduling changes by automating the entire process, connecting the data to all of your existing corporate systems, and ensuring you always have the right qualified employee in each position.
