Employee Scheduling FAQ

About two minutes for a complete monthly roster. By hand, the same roster often takes three to five days. You enter the absences and the requirements, you run the calculation, you review. The engine handles all your teams in a single pass.

It tries every possible combination and keeps the best one: the one that respects all your rules and covers your requirements as well as possible. A spreadsheet checks nothing, and a planner, however experienced, cannot compare thousands of combinations. The engine can.

No. The engine applies your rules, it guesses nothing. No training data, no statistical model, no black box. Every decision is explained by a rule and a numeric cost.

A mandatory rule is always respected: minimum rest, qualifications, approved absences, contract hour limits. It is enforced from the start, not checked afterwards, and the engine cannot produce a roster that breaks it. A preference is desirable without being absolute: fairness, free weekends, no isolated rest day. You decide how much it matters, and the engine arbitrates between preferences when not everything can be satisfied.

You choose the comparison scope: a team, a qualification, or all staff. The engine reduces the gap in working days and shift types between the people compared, and you set how much fairness matters. People absent for a large part of the month are set aside, so the measure is not distorted.

It tells you, rather than returning a roster that breaks a rule. After each run it shows a clear status: optimal, valid, or infeasible. An infeasible result means your mandatory rules contradict each other that month: too many absences, not enough qualified people, or requirements too high for the headcount. You learn it before publishing, not after.

Every activity where positions must be covered daily under strict rules: healthcare, transport, security, logistics, maintenance, airport operations. Each has its own shifts, qualifications and requirements, and that is what we model.

Yes. The engine calculates, you decide. You review the result, you change assignments directly on the grid, and you re-run the calculation whenever you want while keeping your changes: they become additional rules and everything else is re-checked. Every change is logged. The last word is always yours.

No. The application works alongside your current systems. You import your data from Excel, you run the calculation, you export the result to Excel. Nothing to replace, no migration, no IT project. At the start you can compare the computed roster and yours side by side.

Yes. Rules are set per person, per team or for everyone. Each contract type has its own: contractual hours, excluded shifts, weekend rules, limits pro-rated to working time. Fairness is computed within each team, with its own thresholds.

It opens in a browser, and you choose the mode. On-premise, on a workstation or a server of yours: nothing leaves your organisation and everything works with no internet connection, calculation engine included. Or hosted online: reachable from anywhere, the connection only serving to open the application. Nothing is installed on the planners' machines. You can start on-premise and move online later, or the other way round: it is the same application and the same data.

An ordinary machine, but well equipped on the processor side. The engine works on the processor and memory, never on the graphics card. For a team of fewer than 300 people we recommend eight physical cores and 16 GB of memory; four cores and 8 GB are the minimum, the calculation is then longer. A few gigabytes of disk are enough, on Windows, Linux or macOS.

It is yours, entirely. On-premise, it sits on the workstation or server running the application, at your site. Online, on the hosting agreed with you, whose location, backups and access are set in writing before going live. You export everything to Excel at any time and take a full backup in one click. If the relationship ends, you keep everything.

Yes. On-premise, your data never leaves your organisation. Online, the location and backups are set in writing before going live, and we provide a data processing agreement covering the European GDPR and the Swiss nFADP. The application requires a password and keeps a log of every operation.

It all starts with a demonstration on your data: we compute a month you know and compare it with yours. Then a single payment, issued on quotation after we analyse your rules. It covers modelling your operation, your version of the application on-premise or hosted, importing your data, training your planners, a first month validated under real conditions and the first year of support.

None. The payment is one-off and the application belongs to you. The support contract is annual, optional, and cancellable at each renewal.

You keep the application and it keeps producing your rosters. The engine is embedded: no subscription, no remote lock. You lose the updates, direct support, rule adjustments and seasonal recalibration, nothing else. Support can be picked up later again.