Advanced Scheduling Manager (ASM)

The Advanced Schedule Manager (ASM) was developed after having worked closely with many customers and listening to their challenges of real-time, efficient scheduling and integrating this scheduling with Time and Attendance. It’s a powerful tool that supports dynamic and powerful workforce schedule management methods, ultimately increasing scheduling efficiency and productivity.

ASM offers a variety of innovative add-on features that enhance and automate the scheduling capabilities of NOVAtime 5000. With ASM, employees can be manually or automatically scheduled according to resource requirements, which may be based on location, tasks, certifications, and other qualifications. Using ASM, employees can be manually or automatically removed from schedules and placed on leave. The system will then display a list of employees who are available and qualified to fill open positions. For each applicable employee, the system will include configurable contact details, various work hour summaries, and history of accepted and declined work requests—all of which will aid the selection of employees who are offered to fill the open positions. In addition to schedule giveaway, schedule pickup, schedule swapping amongst employees, and open shift bidding, ASM can also identify and automatically contact employees who are qualified to fill open schedules by text message or phone call.

Key Features

  • Expands the existing group level limit to twenty levels
  • Includes a daily roster that displays the scheduled positions and corresponding assigned employees
  • Highlights schedule openings, conflicts, and surpluses
  • Automates schedule generation according to resource requirements, which can be based on locations, tasks, certifications, and other qualifications
  • Limits standard scheduling based on employee qualifications/certifications
  • Identifies and contacts employees who are qualified to fill open schedules
  • Identifies employees with expired certifications

Employee Functions

ASM supports a “schedule giveaway” function that allows employees to offer their scheduled work hours to other qualified employees. “Schedule pickup” enables the qualified employees to accept giveaway schedules or other schedule openings, and employees may also exchange or swap schedules with one another. To regulate schedule modifications, these employee capabilities may be limited to specific date ranges (e.g. within 10 to 20 days from the current date, within 15 days from the date the schedule was made available, etc.). With a variety of scheduling functions offered, the use of each feature can enabled or disable based on system security rules and/or supervisor approval.

Automatic Absence Scheduling

When an employee calls the Phone-in System to report an absence, ASM can automate the process of replacing the absent employee. The system will automatically remove the employee from the work schedule and proceed to contact available and qualified employees (via phone, text, email, or internal system message) to fill the open schedule. ASM may be set up to contact applicable employees one at a time, or the system can contact all applicable employees concurrently. When contacting employees one by one, the sequential process is based on priority settings and a defined response time limit, and the system will continue to call qualified employees until the schedule is accepted. When contacting all employees simultaneously, the first employee to accept the offer will be assigned to the schedule.

Schedule Priority and Preferences

Employees qualify for open schedules according to user-defined priority settings. The priorities determine the order in which the system will consider primary and secondary qualifications. ASM may be set up to schedule employees based on a combination of factors, including seniority, ranking, fewest scheduled hours, least amount of overtime, etc.

Schedule Limitations

To control total scheduled and overtime hours worked by employees, ASM may be configured to apply minimum and maximum hour limitations when identifying which employees are qualified to fill schedules. These limitations can be based on total daily, weekly, or custom cycle hours, taking either scheduled or worked hours into consideration.

Interactive Text,  Email,  and Outbound Phone Call Notifications

Notifications are sent to employees and system users (via phone, text, email, or internal system message) when specific events are detected by ASM. For example, a notification may be sent to inform a supervisor of an expired employee certification, which may be triggered to send prior to or following the expiration, depending on the user’s preference. The system is also able to generate notifications when open schedules exist, schedules are modified, a supervisor requests additional work hours, or when there are schedule surpluses, conflicts, exchanges, giveaways, and pickups.