Electronic Rostering Can Save Huge Amounts of Time and Money
November 21, 2008 nnyq.com editEssentially, e-rostering considers the requirements, worker skills, worker shift history, worker preferences and creates a schedule that not only meets the requirements but also complies with laid-down rules of scheduling. Though routine, this task can be highly demanding when a host of factors need to be considered for each worker. Computers can do it in no time while humans are quite likely to make errors (even after taking a lot more time).
E-rostering also creates greater confidence among the workers that the system is fair in allocating work. Where a worker's preference cannot be met, the system can be programmed to list the factors that led to this disregard. This reason is more likely to be valid and demonstrable, compared to ones likely to be identified by human schedulers.
How E-Rostering Saves on Costs
Scheduling workers to work on different shifts is an essential function in factories that work in shifts. Because of the numerous factors, including applicable regulations under employment laws, this is typically not a straightforward task. Consequently, specialist staff needs to be engaged to do the rostering work, week after week.
Electronic rostering software can cost money initially and probably during installation. Once it has become operational, however, the tedious work of rostering can be carried out with minimal human intervention and recurring costs.
E-rostering can also take into account many more factors while scheduling workers than a human scheduler can during the short time available. By programming all applicable factors, far better schedules can be developed. This typically leads to much better utilization of available manpower and can reduce the incidence of overtime payments or seeking agency help for finding qualified short-term workers.
With both the scheduling exercise and the schedule itself saving on costs, adopting e-rostering can produce significant cost savings.
Additionally, the greater acceptance of e-rostered schedules by employees, for reasons hinted in the previous section, can lead to less grievances and higher productivity.
E-Rostering Leads to Better Compliance With Regulations
The electronic rostering software can keep track of such things as the times already worked by employees, and ensure compliance with working time related regulations under employment laws. These things are easy to overlook when the scheduling is done manually, that too under tight time pressures. On the other hand, these are the very kinds of things that are easy to build into computer programs.
Electronic Rostering Can Accommodate Employee Requests
It is inevitable that employees will have to seek changes to scheduled working hours owing one emergency or other. In a manual rostering system, accommodating such sudden requests and preparing a revised schedule can be a messy and time-consuming affair, and the employee requests might be rejected, even if the emergency is a serious one.
Under e-rostering, preparing a new schedule will be a matter of a few minutes, and it is much more likely for employees to get their requests granted. This is another factor that can lead to greater employee satisfaction with electronic rostering.
