Building rosters: LP-Roster

Building schedules with cyclic rosters comes into its own in organizations where the workload fluctuates within a week but is identical from week to week over a fairly long timescale. The roster is used to build the schedule for all the personnel over several months, with perfect fairness between employees from a simple table generally comprising 7 columns (for the days of the week) and as many lines as there are employees to plan. This can be a particularly complex task because it must both comply with all the labor regulations in force in the company, be as cost-effective as possible by minimizing overtime and downtime and make for working conditions that meet employees’ expectations. These often conflicting aims and the extent of the combinatorics associated with building a roster make this exercise very difficult to pull off manually. Thus the aid of a decision support tool such as the roster building component is invaluable.

The challenges faced

The optimization component is a powerful cyclical roster building tool. It can be used during studies just to supply rosters, or be installed on a customer’s system. It can build full cyclical rosters (a sequence of rest days and working days with precise times and activities) or alternatively provide rest rosters only (only the rest days appear in the roster, the working days appear as blank cells to be filled in at a later date). It can also simply indicate labels (e.g.: morning, night, etc.) for employees’ work days. The LP-Roster component is highly flexible in use and can manage all sorts of labor constraints, however complex they may be.

Why choose our component?

• Build complex cyclical rosters in a matter of minutes
• Test the feasibility and impact of new labor laws
• Propose a number of variants for a single organization
• Build more social and/or economic cyclical rosters
• Capitalize on the roster-building expertise in a tool
• Regularly adapt a roster to changes in the activity
• Test proposals made by the employees easily
• Test proposals made by the hierarchy easily

Main features

• Builds full rosters with precise working times
• Builds rosters with labels (e.g.: morning, night, etc.)
• Builds rest days rosters only
• Configures all types of labor constraints
• Possibility of maximizing the number of rest weekends and distribute them in the best way
• Possibility of encouraging regular working hours or setting up ascending or descending cycles
• Possibility of minimizing odd rest days, odd working days
• Configuring the end of authorized, desired, inopportune and inadmissible sequences