Preference Rules

Preference Rules are an important part of automatic scheduling. They allow you to set your schedule based on employees' preference, pay rate, rank in general or rank in a certain category (area, task, department, etc...), or on how many hours they have worked so far. Preference rules give managers a lot of scheduling flexibility, and allow them to make automatic scheduling optimized to fit the company's specific policies.

Based on your particular preference rules, the system grades each employee for each time block of your schedule, by performing a calculation which determines that employee's suitability for that particular time block. To understand how WorkSchedule.Net generates the grades, refer to the Grades topic.

Understanding how the system uses your preference rules

When you have only one preference rule, it's easy for the system to determine which employee is the best match for an open time block because there is only one rule to go by.

For example, if you only have set the rule "Schedule employee who have the lowest pay rate", then the system will always look at the lowest paid employee and gives him/her the priority in scheduling.

When you have two or more preference rules, the factor of importance for each preference rule gives higher or lower importance to that particular rule in the overall system. The factor of importance is a parameter, which determines how important this rule is with respect to all other preference rules that may exist in the list of rules. The more preference rules that you setup, the more complicated the calculations become.

For example, if you set the preference rule "Schedule employee with the highest rank first" with a factor of 10, and "Schedule employee who have the lowest pay rate" with a factor of 1, the system knows that it should schedule highest ranked employees first. In the case of a tie between two employees, the system evaluates the employees based on the second rule, which basically serves as a tie breaker, and assigns the time block to the employee with the lower pay rate.

See Grades for a full explanation of how the factor of importance is used in the calculation of grades for preference rules.

Preference Rules Overview:

These rules allow you to try to even out the number of working hours for all employees:

• Schedule employee with the least hours already scheduled first: when you add this rule, the system looks at all employees' scheduled time so far, and gives priority of scheduling for the employee who has the least number of hours. You can set the number of days you want to include in this range by putting in the number of days to look behind and the number of days to look ahead.

• Schedule employee with the least hours scheduled so far, per category item: when you add this rule, the system looks at all employees' scheduled time so far, and gives priority of scheduling for the employee who has least number of hours in a certain category item.

These rules allow you to schedule based on employees' rank:

• Schedule employees by rank: when you add this rule, employees will be scheduled by rank. You can set it by highest rank or lowest rank first. Those with that type of rank will be considered for scheduling first.

• Schedule employee by rank for the category item: when you add this rule, employees who have the highest rank in a certain category item, will be considered for scheduling first.