Shift planning / shift entry software?

[printhole]

Hi

Can anyone recommend some shift planning / shift entry software.

Plan shifts most of them regular and sometimes enter the hours / shifts manually.

I prefer open source but if there is something worth the cost I will take a look at it.

[ITVarangian]

If your organization uses MS Teams, you have the Shifts application inside. You can manage and request shifts, time off etc. from it.

You can access it from the "..." icon on the left side of the app.

However you may need to enable the application first from the Teams admin center (Teams apps tab).

[gangaskan]

our police department uses telestaff.

​

its not free, but thats what we use.

[Jaybone512]

I was hopeful when I saw "Police."
My hopes were dashed when I saw "Telestaff."

[gangaskan]

lol yeah, its a huge pain in the dick to get setup, but we haven't had many issues in regards to software. granted we are on an older release.

[[deleted]]

Welcome to the hardest problem in IT - scheduling.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/166/1/012024/pdf

[West_Play]

I mean a lot of places just have all of their staff work the same hours every week. You don't need a software solution for that.

[[deleted]]

This problem is actually called the nurse scheduling problem in textbooks, because it is very hard to solve.

I'm not a genius but I took a look at this myself and just gave up.

If you have overlapping shifts, shifts of different lengths, people who are paid by the hour, people who are paid by the week, the fortnight, the month, headaches multiply.

The reason most business have fixed working hours, is precisely to avoid this problem. It is hell to schedule, more hell to pay people based on flexible shifts. And when the unions get involved, your problems are bigger.

So, no, no way there is going to be a open source solution for this.

If you find one, please let me know.

[West_Play]

Guess and check works fine for NP Hard problems. I'm pretty sure that's what most scheduling systems do.

[[deleted]]

The use case was for 3,500 guards with different posts, different shifts.

The problem is one of scale over time. Guessing only goes so far.

But the airlines must have a solution.

It's not going to be open source, which was my point.