How to Create Automated Employee Schedules

Advanced technology and deep mathematical capabilities power our Collaborative Intelligent Scheduling software and change your day-to-day as a manager. No more scheduling headaches!

How to Create Automated Employee Schedules

The Workforce Labour Optimization Software from SIGMA-HR saves time and streamlines your management tasks by reducing errors and optimizing collaboration within your teams.

The good news? It's designed to be genuinely intuitive. Here's how to create automated schedules in 5 steps.


Step 1: Enter Your Employees' Information

Start by entering your employees' personal information in a profile — name, phone number, address, position, start date, and so on. Be sure to also record each employee's skills. This is what lets you have the right employee in the right place at the right time.


Step 2: Enter the Rules to Follow

Our software adapts to each organization's collective agreements and business rules. Just enter the information, and the software takes care of the rest.

By recording every standard to respect — collective agreement terms, internal policies — the software can build schedules that meet those specifications. The information and constraints can include:

  • the maximum number of hours per day;
  • the number of shifts per week;
  • allowed consecutive hours;
  • the number of hours per week; or
  • the rest period between two working days.

This information can apply to the whole organization, to a group of employees, or to a single employee. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Step 3: Share Access Rights

As a manager or operations director, carrying a heavy workload? Delegate. Give your team members the access they need. Your employees will be able to fill out their availability forms or submit time-off requests, among other things. They'll appreciate the autonomy, and it will strengthen their sense of engagement toward their work and their colleagues.


Read more: La Ligue de l'Enseignement Simplifies HR Management with SIGMA-HR


Step 4: Define Your Staffing Needs

Once your data — employees, rules, and access rights — is saved in the system, you can move on to building a schedule.

Select a shift and the staffing needs for it. For example, determine how many employees are required for each of the company's shifts, including the skills required. You can also enter these needs by attaching them to orders or projects. That's it.

Believe it or not, the system does the work for you from there. Meanwhile, you're free to focus on higher-value tasks. Hard to beat that.


Step 5: Watch the "Magic" Happen

Schedules are generated automatically based on, among other things:

  • required staffing levels;
  • required skills;
  • absences;
  • business rules; and
  • the collective agreement.

When a change is made, every employee gets a notification on their portal, and automatic reminders go out by email. That way, every team member can easily access the latest version of the schedule through the app, from their phone or computer.

Finally, once your initial data entry is complete (Steps 1 and 2), all you'll need to do is repeat Steps 3 through 5 to generate automated schedules going forward. You can update your employees' information or your collective agreement at any time.

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FAQ

How does constraint-based scheduling work?

Constraint-based scheduling software lets you define rules — like maximum hours per day, required rest periods between shifts, or collective agreement terms — once, and then generates schedules that automatically respect every one of them.

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Can scheduling software really apply my collective agreement automatically?

Yes. Once your collective agreement terms and internal policies are entered into the system, the software builds every schedule around those rules, whether they apply company-wide, to a specific group, or to a single employee.

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How much manual work does automated scheduling actually remove?

Once employee data, rules, and access rights are set up, generating a new schedule mainly involves defining staffing needs for a shift — the system handles rule-checking and shift assignment from there.

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What happens when a schedule changes after it's published?

Every affected employee receives a notification through their portal along with an automatic email reminder, so the whole team can access the latest version of the schedule from their phone or computer.

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Can employees access their schedules without needing IT support each time?

Yes. Granting employees their own access lets them view schedules, submit availability, and request time off directly, without funnelling every request through a manager.

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