<!––>It’s happened again. Your planners say there’s no way to avoid scheduling overtime if you want to meet your service level agreements. Failing to meet these agreements is out of the question. Your company is a market leader in a highly competitive sector where personnel shortages attract heavy penalties.

Looking at the cost of all that overtime, you can’t help wondering if it’s really necessary. And if it is, why are there also clear signs of overcapacity?

As a workforce optimization consultant, I come across situations like this all the time. One of the first things I look out for is shifts that bear little or no relation to demand.

Of course most companies agree that workforce planning decisions should be driven by anticipated demand. So why aren’t they?

The fact is that this kind of demand-driven capacity planning can be extraordinarily complicated. Planners have to deal with:

• A  range of constraints, from government and labor agreements, to service level agreements and training requirements
• Employee preferences for leave, particular types of contract, and certain shifts
• Employees with a wide variety of skills and  qualifications

Overwhelmed by complexity, many companies create fixed capacity plans or use fixed rotations, in spite of changing capacity requirements. In such cases, it’s useful to consider whether a different pattern of shifts would eliminate unnecessary overtime, while still taking labor regulations, business rules and shift preferences into account.

Planners should be able to answer this kind of question quickly and easily, but can’t. Given the level of complexity involved, no human can.

To arrive at shifts that enable the best match between capacity and demand, planners need the support of an intelligent planning system that incorporates all the relevant regulations, business rules and shift preferences.

Such a system would enable planners to:

• Generate a demand curve (based on the headcount required for each role and unit of time) and explore how various shift patterns affect KPIs such as overtime, compliance with labor/union regulations, and the fulfillment of shift preferences.
• Instruct an optimizer to generate shifts that fulfill demand optimally based on the importance planners ascribe to various KPIs.

The best time to avoid unnecessary overtime is at the strategic planning level – weeks to months before daily rosters are created. By the time your operational planners realize that overtime is inevitable, it usually is.

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