Why Scheduling Is So Important

Scheduling employees is an integral part of running any business… but understanding the impact of these schedules is equally important.

Most organizations tend to schedule to a budget, some to a coverage type model and few even to a forecasted demand. Scheduling to a forecasted demand is the best way to schedule as it helps you align your employees with your customers and make sure you have the right people in the right place at the right time.

While this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it generally takes a little bit more work. To start, getting an accurate forecast is critical and seems to be an area where many organizations fail. Of course, forecasting your sales and customer traffic is not an easy task… it requires a sense of history (i.e. sales and traffic data for the past year or two), an understanding of the forecasted weather and how the weather impacts your specific business, special events, other events in the community that may impact you, and much more.

Many organizations that implement a scheduling system tend to only take a few of these items into consideration, generally only just sales (POS) data. The impact of this is ofcourse a forecast that is not the best or most accurate that it can be. But for them, it does the job. Some times, its also just the first step of their scheduling plan and it gives them a chance to get their feet wet.

But there are still organizations that don’t use automated scheduling tools. I’ve come across companies that just use the same schedule from last week… or receive ‘hours’ from head office and create a schedule that utilizes those hours. Most often, these schedules fail to consider customer traffic, employee availability and other considerations that should be incorporated into a schedule.