Case Studies

1. Introduction

Scheduling can be performed in various ways using the CTWS e.g. based on forms or in graphic Gantt charts, with or without workflow support, and can be adapted to all possible industries, from service providers to manufacturing firms. In the following examples, we show some typical graphical ways of scheduling and introduce some very simple examples. For real customer examples, please see Client Testimonials and Press Releases.

Graphical scheduling can accommodate the following resource types (usually on the left Y-axis of the Gantt chart:

These resources can accommodate various types of booking (typically on the x-axis (time), which can then be used internally and externally for all possible types of resource:

All objects behave differently and in combination, several possibilities arise for display and working. We show some individual configurations in the following.

2. Classical Rostering

The simplest form of rostering is to assign a shift to an employee so that the employee can be informed in various ways about his planned deployment. Shifts can be created for an employee manually in an ad-hoc way, by copying en masse or by template.

3. Rostering using Shift Templates

3.1 Standard Rostering

In this type of scheduling a shift must be filled, e.g. "Hotline Program A", "Team Lead" or "Edit Desk Studio B". For this the shift, typically rolled up from a template must be associated with a so-called shift resource of the relevant employee. The shift itself is then two associated resources - this shift resource to be filled and the employee.

3.2 Equipment Scheduling

In this case, there are a number of shifts, such as "morning show" and "afternoon show", based on a kind of central resource, e.g. "Studio 1". The various shifts are loaded by template on to the equipment resource and rolled out over time. Then the various shifts with the specific equipment can be assigned to the employees. Therefore, the specific shift also has two resources here: the equipment resource and the employee.

All the employees can be assigned manually, semi-automatically, or fully automatically by rolling out Shift Patterns.

4. Classical Job Planning

4.1 Job Planning

The easiest way to plan a job, after being manually generated in Order Management or in Scheduling itself via templates, by mass copying or via workflow, is to move it from the "unassigned" area to an employee. Even this can be avoided, as the jobs can be created already assigned to an employee so that he, his team, or his department can start executing immediately without any direct intervention from dispatch.

4.2 Equipment Planning

It often happens that employees must perform a job with the use of material resources e.g. in "Studio A", in a vehicle or with a colleague. Then a job can easily be allocated to multiple resources so that all get the same jobs. If price calculation plays a role, different prices for each resource of a job can be pulled up in the background using activity types.

5. Planning with Shift Resources

5.1 Shift Job Planning

With this, specific jobs for various shifts, which, for example, have been created in orders, are scheduled to staff and equipment resources. For reasons of clarity in this case, the equipment resource "studio 1" is split into two shifts "early studio 1" and "late studio 1". This allows the jobs of "morning show" and "afternoon show", which share the same resource, to be displayed independently of each other on their own so-called shift resource. Then, as usual, the job that must be fulfilled on a shift resource is moved to an available employee resource. Entire projects can be scheduled like this and are separated visually from others.

5.2 Project Job Planning

Project job planning works very similarly. If, for example, selections of a few similar projects are created for a radio station, then the projects can be created on resource rows without using the order management module. Then specific projects can be created on the project resources (e.g. "recording1") in an ad-hoc way e.g. "recording opera show" which are then assigned to staff to work on. The advantage here is that it is possible to work on infrequent projects quick and ad-hoc working without activity types, etc.

5.3 Open Team-Job Planning

In this case there are several jobs per order (e.g. "cameraman", "technicians" and equipment resources) of collected activities (e.g. "outside broadcast team") to be scheduled to a team which always has to be assembled according to availability. The particular job requests are first distributed to the various team roles (e.g. "camera team", "technician team") to plan capacity. This pre-planning, e.g. for a program that can be rolled over time in an interval (e.g. daily or weekly). Then these jobs can be moved later to specific employees, so that each team job is scheduled and thus the team is assembled.