The aim of this book is to teach you how to calculate how many staff you need to run your operation.

The aim of this series of books is to provide a reference guide for t he types of available shift patterns by way of supplying a total of almost 300 unique shift patterns.

This book is about how to organise staff holidays so that they do not affect the operation. A Holidays Included Shift Pattern will accommodate everyone’s holiday in the shift pattern.

This book not only includes easy to follow examples of how to calculate your Absence Rate, but also shows you how to use your Absence Rate to predict how absences will occur in the future. This book has look-up tables which convert Absence Rate in to the number you would expect to be off shift.

Shift working is also more fatiguing than office hours working; this is especially prevalent if working nights. However this book is about minimising fatigue and the effects of fatigue so that you can enjoy the advantages of working shifts without being too fatigued.

Managing holidays are the bane of all managers. The aim of this book is to show you some simple techniques to relieve you of the burden. With a special section on Office Hours, this book is ideal for all managers.

Have you found that the year is just not  long enough to fit in all the holidays?

The aim of this book is to help managers with their shift operations. Holidays and absences can play havoc with most operations unless special procedures are in place. This book provides the solutions used by us when setting up a shift system.

These books and others are available from Amazon, simply search using ‘jezewski moore’.

All prices subject to vat for UK based organisations.

Flexible Capacity

BLOGS • Holiday Entitlements, • Cover Shifts, • Easter, • Fair Holiday Scheduling, • High Sickness, • Forward Planning, • Skiing, • Frosty Mornings, • 10-hour Shifts, • How Good is your Maths, • Unlimited Holidays, • Stagger Lunch, • Optimise Equipment, • Absence Management, • Christmas Presents, • Wedding Planners, • Bank Holidays, • Annualised Hours, • Inventory Modeling, • How Many Staff are needed, • Flexi-Time, • Cover for Sickness, • Global shift planning. • and many more

Businesses are faced with the challenge of responding to market demand faster than ever before. Demand is getting harder and harder to predict and organisations, be they businesses, hospitals or public bodies, need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently. If a business does not respond quickly, they lose the order, if they do not respond efficiently, they lose money, if they do not respond, they will go out of business. If a hospital does not respond to new demands for services, patients will go untreated and some will die unnecessarily. If a public body, be it a council or government department does not respond, the public will lose confidence in the authority and vote it out of office, or even worse go to the newspapers. It is all about getting the right people, in the right place, at the right time. That means being able to change the staffing levels quickly. Being able to predict demand is one such factor, being able to react to the predicted demand is much more difficult. If the demand is variable and uncertain, the planned response must also be variable and cover each element of uncertainty. This will involve short and long term labour planning. One traditional solution is to use overtime and temporary labour to cover fluctuations in demand. In many situations this response is adequate and a 'pool' of workers are on stand-by. Unfortunately, this approach is not flexible enough in the new market conditions. There is only a finite level of extra capacity this can deliver in a given situation, and there are many hidden drawbacks to relying on using overtime and temps. The overtime tends to become institutionalised and abused, and becomes a fixed cost rather than a flexible cost. Temps need training and the constant need for training to use continually changing technology can make them more expensive than having full time staff. Multi-Strategy solutions require IT methods and resources. Flexible working that meets the flexible workload requires a variable planned response where all the elements of using labour are utilised. Having a pool of multi-skilled and specialist, full-time workers, part-time workers, annualised hours to vary the working week, overtime and temporary labour on variable contracts, are all used to expand and contract capacity to meet the demand curve. A recent report on official statistics shows that nearly 10% of all UK employees working for less than 45 hours per week want to work more. This figure only reflects those who want to work at basic rates and excludes the sizable number who would work at overtime rates. This means that you could get more work out of your employees without having to pay them a premium. The statistics also revealed that more part-time than full-time employees wanted longer hours. And of this group, those in the 35-49 age group wanted longer hours the most. This is ideal if you are looking to increase production or provide a greater range of services - by considering part-timers first, you are less likely to have to pay overtime and won't have to worry about exceeding the 48 hours per week limit. VisualrotaX and C-Desk Technology gives you that flexible capacity capability.

The ability to respond to changes in demand for products and services.

Agency, temps or bank staff often need regular training to operate effectively.

Your response to changes is slower if you roster everyone onto fixed permanent shifts. You need to have a way of moving them to other times, to avoid problems in meeting workload demand. If you can’t move the shifts,  then you can only move the work timetable. Hence, using Operations Research methodology you could optimise the way the work flowed through the organisation. You could optimise your supply chain by rearranging where goods entered, where distributed throughout the facility and stored before going out. You could optimise everything except that one element that really counts, labour. There are many tools that can help with these optimisations, but only one tool to help you distribute your staff over the year to when they are needed, and that is ourselves.