Building cyclic rosters

These cyclic rosters (otherwise known as work cycles) are widely used in companies to build schedules with perfect fairness between employees, and provide them with forward vision of their schedule.

These rosters are not individual schedules, and are often built for a standard week’s workload intended for each uniform group of workers with similar skills and contracts. Each line on the roster represents the week’s (or other period) schedule for a worker or team, which when put into production, links up with the week described on the line immediately below and the last line in the roster links up with the first line. Each roster is designed to be rolled out (replicated over its application horizon of several weeks, offsetting each week by one line in relation to the previous week) to create a provisional or theoretical individual schedule.

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 (over a full year, over an IATA season, during school times, etc.). They can be limited to the positioning of rest days, thus leaving some room for manœuvre to individualize schedules to remove some of the inherent rigidity of setting up cyclic rosters in an organization.

Eurodecision has capitalized on its experience through its human resources software platform that includes an optimization module dedicated to building cyclic rosters. Eurodecision’s services (advice, implementation of software solutions, etc.) are based on this module.