🎯 For Admins. This feature, formally called Planning metrics, is included in the Pro Plan and up. Reach out to our support team if you'd like to try it out.
Data Center sets and formulas can be used to ensure that the demands of your organisation are met in a smart way. For instance, you can highlight how many shifts will be needed for the upcoming period or let your schedule managers know how many events/bookings are coming up.
Here's a step by step guide on how to use Data Center formulas for planning the number of shifts you need to cover the demanded workload.
Guide for demand planning
Go to Reports > Data center > Data sets and choose Add data.
Give your data set a descriptive ID, and add a description.
Select the time unit option that will allow you to input data for each day and choose to assign your metrics different values to individual positions within a department.
Then choose the Department for which you need to plan shifts from the dropdown menu.
Click Done and then create a Formula. You will need the Formula metric to display the demand numbers from the Data set you just created.
Go to Reports > Data Center > Formulas and choose Add formula.
Give your formula a descriptive ID, and add a description. The ID for the Formula metric should be different than the ones set for the Data metric yet related. See an example below.
Toggle visibility in Schedule on, so this formula will be visible in your schedule.
Choose to assign your metrics different values to individual positions within a department.
Then choose the Department for which you need to plan shifts from the dropdown menu.Make sure that the assignment settings and the Department for your Formula metric match your Data metric: Assign different values to individual positions and the same Department is selected from the dropdown menu.
Click on Done to continue with the next steps.
Create a formula that will show you the difference between how many shifts you have assigned on a given day versus how many shifts you need.
You can do this through a formula that subtracts (uses the '-' operator) the data from your Data set (created from the steps above) from the Assigned shifts, by Position - Daily Schedule element.
A very important detail to note is that the Assigned shifts, by Position - Daily element, will only count the assigned shifts from your schedule. This means that Shifts with any other status will be ignored (e.g. Open Shifts).
On the Data Center > Data sets page, select the Data set you just created to start entering the Shift demand for your schedule Positions.
You will need to repeat these steps for every Department you need to have a planning overview for.
Once you're done setting up the demand planning metrics for all your Departments, go to your schedule page where you will now see the metrics as daily numbers:
a negative number means there are not enough assigned shifts to cover the demand. The number will indicate how many shifts you still need to assign.
zero means you have matched the demand,
a positive number means you have exceeded the demand. The number will indicate how many extra shifts you have scheduled for that day.
Here's how it could look in the Schedule. The example uses a demand of two shifts for each of the three days. In the picture below:
the first day has an extra shift,
the second day still needs two shifts to be assigned
the third day has two assigned shifts, which meets the demand for the day.
Notice that the Open shift is ignored by the demand planning metric.
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