Scheduling preferences is the 3rd tab. This is where you can customize scheduling rules for your agency, such as cancellation and shift durations, and how the system rates personnel for assignment picking.
Shift ranking weights determine how important all of these factors are to you when the system is deciding how to rank all of the personnel in the Assignment Details. For instance, you may not care about seniority, or you may value experience higher than distance.
- Appropriateness
- this is derived from the personnel's three ratings, which you can find in their Qualifications tab. The higher this number, the higher the personnel will rank in the assignment summary personnel lists.
- Distance
- This is based on the distance from their home address (or whichever address is listed in their Personnel Profile), to the assignment in question. The closer to them it is, the higher this score will be in influencing their rank.
- Hours to overtime
- This number is based on how close to overtime the personnel is. The farther from OT the person is, the higher they will rank.
- Seniority
- This basically ranks senior personnel higher than 'rookie' personnel. You might weight this higher if you want more senior personnel to have a better chance of getting assignments first.
- Experience
- This is a number based on how often the personnel has been to this client or location before. The assumption is that they will know the procedures or their way around the place better, and will work more efficiently.
- Declined shifts
- This will rank personnel lower if they've declined assignments at this client or location previously.
- Hours worked
- Lastly, this is somewhat of an equalizer - this will rank people with lower hours over-all, higher. It's kind of a way to just mix things up so that the work is spread out more evenly among your personnel.
1. To change any of these weights, click the + or - buttons to raise or
lower the weight. A higher weight means that factor will count more
heavily in the ranking, while a lower weight means the opposite.
2. Setting a weight to 0 means that the system will not consider it when determining assignment personnel ranking.
3. In the case where all weights are set to 0, personnel will be ordered alphabetically.
1. If both are enabled, availability will work as normal.
2. If only one is checked, users will only be able to set that type - either available (and everything else is ‘not set’, or not-available (and everything else is ‘not set’.
3. If neither is set, availability is disabled.
1. Default shift duration is how long an assignment will be, by default, in the New Assignment creator and Quickshift creator (see pages 13 & 17). You can of course still change the duration of a new assignment.
2. You can set a minimum shift length that is different from the ‘default shift duration’ above. You can define it per day and hours in the day. On the days specified, between the hours specified, the minimum assignment length is as set. At all other times not specified, it will be as set in the ‘All other times’ text box.
If left blank, the settings will just default to the ‘default shift duration’ above.
Lastly, if you want to customize how double-booking is handled, you can specify the number of hours free that personnel must have between assignments.
For example, if you’ve set that for a 6 hour assignment, there must be 3 hours of downtime, upon opening the assignment, the system will look forward and back 3 hours. Anyone who has worked within that time will be disqualified, and will not show up in any of the selection lists.
Assignments shorter than 3 hours, or longer than 12 will use the next closest setting for determining down time.