How do I automatically generate a schedule?

Need your schedule to be created automatically? We’ve got you covered. We’ll use your forecasts, scheduling rules, existing events, and other settings to create optimized schedules just for your team. Let’s get started!

In this article:

• What is a generated schedule?
• What do I need to get started?
• How do I generate a schedule?
• How do I customize my generated schedules?
• Something isn’t working the way I expect. What should I do about it?

What is a generated schedule?

Creating schedules that follow all your requirements and ensure coverage can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Rather than building every schedule manually — let our AI schedule assistant do the hard work for you.

To do this, we use your forecast, your team’s current events, and the rules you’ve already made for your schedule. That means the schedule we generate will already follow all your labor laws and requirements, and it will take your coverage needs into account.

Once we’ve generated a new schedule for you, you’re in charge. You can review, manually edit, generate again, and publish the final schedule whenever you’re happy with it.

What do I need to get started?

Generating a schedule is pretty simple, but there are a few steps to get you set up first! Here’s what you need to do.

1. Tell us when people work

Before you can generate a schedule, you’ll need to define when your team members work their shifts. We call these “working hours.” You can add them for individuals, teams, sites, or other groups on your scheduling rules page. Find out how.

To set your team up correctly, create working hours for each person who needs their schedule generated. If someone doesn’t have any working hours defined, we won’t create a schedule for them.

After everyone’s working hours have been defined, we’ll create a schedule by filling those hours with the optimal mix of productive time, breaks, lunches, and other events.

2. Tell us what events to include

By default, your generated schedule will already include productive time — that’s the work your team members do every day.

Because you’ll need breaks, meals, meetings, and other events added to everyone’s shifts, the next step is to create rules for those events. Here’s a guide.

Your event rules help us create a schedule that makes sense for your team. Here are a few tips:

• Create a rule for any event you need to include. If you don’t have a rule for a specific type of non-productive event, we won’t add it to your schedule.
• Assign anyone who needs that event. If you don’t assign someone to the event rule, we won’t schedule the event for that person.
• Make rigid rules to limit our options. For example, you know that everyone in Site A must have a 30-minute meal in every shift, so you create a rule with that requirement. When we generate your schedule, everyone in Site A will have a 30-minute meal.
• Make flexible rules to give us more options. For example, people in Site B are entitled to a meal every shift, but it can be between 30 and 60 minutes long. You can add that flexibility in the rule, and we’ll schedule people for different meal lengths to maximize your coverage.

3. Add requirements for shifts

Finally, you’ll use your scheduling rules to define what a shift is at your company. For example, you might specify maximum shift length, required rest time between shifts, minimum number of consecutive work days, and so on. For help creating these rules, check out our guide.

How do I generate a schedule?

Done with the setup steps in the previous section? Let’s generate your first schedule!

1. In the main navigation, expand the Schedule section and select Schedule generation.
2. Choose a time period you’d like to schedule and select Generate in that cell.
3. Wait a few minutes. This process can take a few minutes, depending on your team size. You can leave this page if you need to.
4. When the new schedule is ready, select the three-dot icon [•••] for that time period and select View schedule. We’ll take you to the staffing timeline to see the schedule in action.
5. Review it and make any manual changes you’d like. If things don’t seem right, you might want to adjust your scheduling rules and then generate the schedule again.
6. When you’re happy with the changes, select Publish schedule. You’re done!

How do I customize my generated schedules?

You can customize how your schedules are created on the Schedule generation page. Select the Configure button to check out your options.

If you select Generation dashboard, you can customize your basic settings: the destination schedule you’ll generate to, the time interval for a generated schedule, the time zone, and how far ahead in the future you’d like generate schedules.

If you select Scheduling rules, you can create or update rules that will be used as inputs for your schedule in the future.

Something isn’t working the way I expect. What should I do about it?

Need help with schedule generation? We’ve collected a quick list of the most common issues — and how to solve them.

Why is my schedule blank?

There are three common reasons your newly generated schedule could be blank:

• First, check that your schedule has finished generating. This can take a while, especially if you have a large team and a lot of scheduling rules, so wait until the process is complete before reviewing the schedule.
• The next most likely cause is that working hours aren’t assigned correctly. You’ll need working hours for every person who needs to be scheduled. To fix this:
  1. Visit your Scheduling rules page.
  2. Select the By person tab and scroll through the list of your team members.
  3. You’ll find an alert by the person’s name you if someone doesn’t have working hours.
  4. Add working hours for those people, and make sure they apply to the time period you’d like to generate.
• Finally, your schedule could be blank if there’s a problem with the way the generated schedule is configured. To check your settings:
  1. Open the Schedule generation page.
  2. Select Configure and then select Generation dashboard.
  3. Make sure you've selected the right destination, interval, and time period to generate for. It’s possible that your schedule was generated — just sent to a different schedule than the one you’re viewing.

Why are some working hours being ignored?

If you have multiple working hours rules for the same people, those rules can conflict. When we generate a schedule, we’ll only apply one working hours rules at a time.

You can find and resolve conflicting rules on the Scheduling rules page.

1. Select the By person tab and find the list of people you want to schedule.
2. Anyone who has conflicting working hours will be flagged with a warning message.
3. Select Resolve > on each warning message to decide which working hours rule we should use.

My scheduling rules aren’t being used correctly — why not?

There can be conflicts between other scheduling rules if they require the same time slot or when shifts have overlapping requirements.

Sometimes, there’s just an error in the way a scheduling rule has been set up. Review your scheduling rules to make sure they’re set up correctly.

Stuck? Reach out to us at support@assembled.com and we’d be glad to help!