A company’s workforce is typically one of its most expensive and most valuable assets. Workforce scheduling needs to focus on both efficiency and employee retention. 

Challenges are to solve issues such as:

• a lot of temporary hiring
• people regularly work fewer hours than contracted for
• high work pressure
• high absenteeism
• lots of paperwork (administrative operations, internal reporting)
• confusion over or complaints about extra salary payments (overtime, inconvenience)
• warnings from the Labour Inspectorate
• shifts that are experienced as “difficult”
• complaints about rigid attitude towards accommodating staff wishes
• high percentage of overtime and/or irregular hours
• complaints about quality of duty rosters
• confusion over number of outstanding workload hours
• complaints about coordination of availability of specific job grades
• planners never have time to spend on long-term planning (anticipation)
• peak workloads regularly alternate with quiet days
• many shift switches and roster changes (after publication)
• mismatch between staffing composition and staffing needs

• reduction of the required work hours in the primary process (such as security officers in a security organization or doctors and nurses in a hospital) by:
• reducing temporary hiring,
• reducing wage costs.

• reduction of the required work hours in the secondary process:
• for planners,
• for administrative operations (salary processing, HRM, communication on rosters and roster changes to and with staff),
• major savings in the administrative processes occur frequently.
• making quality improvements by doing more work in the same hours (time gains are exchanged for labour), resulting in: higher productivity

Always have the best people on the job
In the Netherlands, TNT takes care of mail delivery for every household. Which means: more then 8 million doors to visit each day. For this job, and for many related jobs, more then 40.000 have to be scheduled. Day by day. TNT relies for this on the ORTEC Workforce Scheduling Solution.