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Autofill Shifts

Fill your shifts with the perfect people

Building schedules is complex, takes time and can be error-prone. The ramifications of building a schedule incorrectly can be severe too, ranging from loss of revenue, poor customer service, compliance breaches, unhappy employees and over or inefficient expenditure.
With the click of a button, Ento’s schedule builder can save your managers time by assigning employees to shifts across the schedule, taking into account availability, labour costs, proficiency, utilisation & common fatigue rules to schedule the best person for each shift.

Using autofill

Once activated, the autofill button will appear for all managers in the ‘action bar’ on the top right of the schedule.
Click  to autofill unassigned shifts or optimise existing shifts within your schedule.
When you have nothing selected, this will fill all unassigned shifts in the whole schedule. To do specific roles , days or cells firstly select the appropriate cell & then use autofill.
Ento will then evaluate your schedule, shifts & employees  to come to the ideal shift & employee matches.

Reviewing suggestions

Once Ento has assessed all possible combinations, you are able to see the confidence & impact of each suggested new assignment.

  • Click ‘Apply’ to accept the suggestion
  • Tick ‘Apply to remaining suggestions’ to accept all


Ento will display these suggestions in order from lowest confidence to highest. This is so that you can manually apply or dismiss the lower confidence ones individually to the point where you’re happy to then bulk ‘Apply to remaining changes’ for the rest.
Only at this point will Ento actually assign those employees and notify them if requested earlier in the process.

How Ento chooses which employee to assign

Ento uses a complex algorithm to match your employees to shifts. This algorithm looks at your whole schedule to ensure you are getting the overall best outcome.
When matching employees to shifts Ento will consider the below:

  • Availability (avoiding leave, unavailability and other shifts)
  • employee base rates
  • Proficiency via star ratings
  • role compliance (has permission to work the role and has any required qualifications)
  • Over & under utilisation (how many hours is the employee scheduled to work this week)
  • Break requirements
  • Consecutive days worked
  • Time between shifts
  • Minimum shift lengths

 

Limitations

There are a few things that autofill doesn’t consider. These are:

  • Managers won’t receive a ‘warn and block’ popup, though these can be sees as alerts when stepping through suggestions
  • employees must be assigned & qualified for roles, this mean role & location secondments aren’t considered
  • Uses only indicative costs based on base rate and length of shifts, it will not do a full interpretation of afternoon/weekend/holiday penalties, etc.
  • Doesn’t check for custom award warnings, only standard fatigue rules such as consecutive days, minimum shift lengths, etc.

If you’re interested in having autofill turned on for your account, or you have any questions about how it works, please feel free to get in touch with Ento Support using the chat bubble on the bottom left of the page.

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