Schedule generation

Use schedule generation to build your team’s schedules ahead of time without placing every event by hand. Assembled fills each person’s working hours with productive work, breaks, meals, and other events, following your scheduling rules and covering your forecast as well as it can. Results are saved to a test schedule, so you can review, edit, and regenerate them before you publish.

To open it, go to Schedule > Schedule generation.

Note: To turn on schedule generation for your company, contact our team.

How schedule generation works

Schedule generation uses:

• Your scheduling rules: working hours, event rules, shift rules, and productive work rules.
• Your forecast: the required staffing for each channel and queue.
• Your existing schedule: time off, recurring events, and events placed by hand.
• Each person’s attributes: the channels, queues, and skills they can work.

When it places events, it follows these principles:

• It changes as little as possible. It moves an event only if that meaningfully improves coverage.
• Manual events stay where they are. Generation replaces automated events but keeps time off, recurring events, Google Calendar events, and events someone created or edited by hand. If a manually placed event already meets a rule, generation doesn’t add another one, even if there’s a better time for it.
• Covered queues aren’t changed. If a queue’s net staffing is already positive, generation doesn’t try to improve it further.
• It looks at all channels and queues together. Generation balances coverage across every channel and queue, not the filtered view you see on the Staffing timeline.
• People only get work they’re eligible for. Productive work is assigned only for channels, queues, and skills a person can work.
• People with time off are scheduled last. Generation places events for people without time off first.
• Custom date range rules aren’t used. Event rules that repeat During custom date range are used by the schedule assistant only.

Schedule generation and the schedule assistant

Both use the same rules. Use whichever matches the job.

When schedule generation works best

Schedule generation works best for larger teams, where placing events by hand takes a long time and staffing patterns are complex enough to benefit from optimization. It aims for the best coverage, not a specific output, so the more you need to control exactly who’s scheduled for what and when, the less it helps. It may suit you less if:

• Your team is small and schedules are mostly agreed in advance.
• You have many per-person requirements that can’t be expressed as shared rules.
• You need a precise result, such as exactly 5 agents on Phone at 10:00 AM.

You can also combine the two: generate some event types and manage others by hand.

Set up schedule generation

Before you generate a schedule, set up the rules it uses.

1. Create working hours for everyone who needs a schedule. Generation fills each person’s working hours with events, and doesn’t schedule anyone without them. See Working hours.
2. Create event rules for breaks, meals, meetings, and any other events to include, and assign them to the people who need them. Productive work is included without a rule. See Scheduling rules.
3. Create shift rules for your labor requirements, such as maximum shift length, rest between shifts, and consecutive working days.
4. Optional: create productive work rules if you need control over which work types people are scheduled for.
5. Configure the dashboard. See Configure schedule generation.

Tips for event rules

• Create a rule for every non-productive event you need. If there’s no rule for an event type, generation doesn’t add it.
• Assign everyone who needs the event. If someone isn’t assigned to an event rule, generation doesn’t schedule that event for them.
• Use fixed rules to limit the options. For example, if everyone in Site A must have a 30-minute meal in every shift, create a rule with that requirement, and everyone in Site A gets a 30-minute meal.
• Use flexible rules to give more options. For example, if people in Site B get a meal of 30 to 60 minutes, set that range in the rule. Generation then uses different meal lengths to maximize coverage.

Configure schedule generation

1. Go to Schedule > Schedule generation.
2. Select Automation settings.
3. In Configure schedule generation, set the options below.
4. Select Save.

To change your rules, select Scheduling rules at the top of the page.

Generate a schedule

1. Go to Schedule > Schedule generation.
2. Find the interval you want to schedule and select Create schedule.
3. Wait while the status shows Pending. This can take a few minutes, depending on the size of your team. You can leave the page while it runs. To stop it, open the Actions menu for that interval and select Cancel generation.
4. When the status shows Ready for review, select View schedule for that interval. If it isn’t shown on the interval, open the interval’s Actions menu and select it there. The Staffing timeline opens on the destination schedule.
5. Review the schedule and make any changes by hand. If something isn’t right, adjust your scheduling rules and select Create schedule again.
6. When you’re happy with it, select Publish schedule on the Staffing timeline. See Test schedules.

To see which rules were used, open the Actions menu and select View rules. If the result isn’t what you expected, see Unexpected schedule generation results.

Generate shifts from working hours

If your dashboard also has Shifts and Shift plans rows, you can generate each person’s shifts before you generate their events.

1. In the Shifts row, select Generate working hours for the interval. Generation creates shifts from people’s working hours and your shift rules.
2. When it’s ready, select View details to review the shifts.
3. Publish the shifts. In Publish generated shifts, choose Everyone or Specific agents under Whose shifts do you want to publish?, then select Publish shifts.
4. Generate events for the same interval with Create schedule.

To generate shifts again, select Regenerate. This replaces the shifts generated earlier for that interval.

In the Shift plans row, select Plan shifts to plan the shifts you need for assigned and open coverage, then assign them to people. To see your plans, select View all shift plans.