A work shift planning tool is crucial for companies because the work shift planning is a critical task for manufacturing and logistics companies and it is a multi-objective activity that contemplates different needs such as adequate shifts of workers, the possibility of performing and optimizing individual work processes, and finally the minimization of overtime or consultancy related costs.
In industrial companies there is a variety of products and processes, the presence of several shifts distributed throughout the day, and a large number of employees with different skills involved in very different tasks; in these cases the planning problem is particularly complex, also taking into account the regulations and employment contracts, which impose legal restrictions on the methods of employment of personnel.
It is therefore necessary to have an appropriate shift planning tool that is not limited to providing support to the human resource office, but allows an effective automatic planning of work shifts that is compatible with the contractual constraints and operational needs of the company.
This result can be achieved through the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques for the management of work shifts, which are based on automatic reasoning and, through the definition of appropriate logical rules, allow to form work teams in a completely automatic way, allowing at the same time, compliance with legal restrictions and optimization of production parameters.
i-Plan: the Revelis’ shift planning tool
Let’s consider a manufacturing or logistics company in the following situation:
- different activities to be carried out at the same time (e.g. production of different batches of different products, shipment/movement of goods in different operating conditions)
- contractual constraints on the use of staff (e.g. minimum number of hours of rest between two shifts, staff rotation for the same duties)
- extra-contractual constraints, related to the optimization of activities (eg use of resources with more pronounced skills for “difficult” or “particular” processes)
In these scenarios, i-Plan is the employee scheduling software created by Revelis that allows the optimization of work shift planning. i-Plan offers features for:
- Define the allocation needs
- Automatically calculate work shifts, in compliance with contractual and extra-contractual constraints
- Allow planners to manually change calculated shifts
- Realize in a short time the allocation of personnel on single, daily, weekly, monthly shifts
Thanks to i-Plan, shift management becomes a simple and very fast job, giving the staff office the possibility to modify the planning even several times a day, to react in real time to changing operational needs.
The benefits of shift scheduling software
In an increasingly dynamic and demanding work environment, companies need to:
- maximize results
- constantly measure performance
- minimize inefficiencies
i-Plan enables efficient work shift planning, facilitating companies in optimizing the production process and raising operating standards, by a significant reduction in work shift calculation times, greater control over compliance with constraints contractual and non-contractual, and a high flexibility and configurability of the platform.
