Rules & Score

Owned by XCALLY Knowledge (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 25, 2024 by Product Knowledge
6 min read

 

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Rules

In Manage Rules it’s possible to define rules to determine scheduling score based on the variables defined here and to activate Solve Roster correctly.

 

You can insert week start day, Disable all rules and above all switch on/off the different rules (info icon next to each rule can help you to understand the meaning of them)

Of each rule, you can decide to enable it, defining weight (hard/medium/soft score)

and weight value, choosing the relative score

And click on Save

Rules are sorted by showing the active ones first and then the inactive ones, in order of weight from the most important to the one with the least weight value.

For example to enable the correct operation of the solve roster you need to enable as basic rules at least Assign every shift (with e.g. Medium Score 10), Required skill (with e.g. Hard Score 100), No Overlapping shifts (with e.g. Hard Score 20).

When a rule is disabled in the algorithm it is not considered. So it's essential to set the rules that are important for you to allow the algorithm calculation to start and it takes only those that have a weight >0.

 

Rules List

These are rules that you can enable, choosing relative weight and score value:

 

 

 

  • Required skill: you can only assign a shift to employees who have required skills for the chosen spot

  • Unavailable time slot: penalty to insert an unavailable employee into the workshift

  • Absent employee: penalty to insert an absent employee into the workshift

  • No overlapping shifts: the same employee cannot be on several shifts at the same time

  • Assign every shift: all unassigned shifts must be assigned

  • Lunch break: system considers lunch break on shifts planning

  • Contract maximum daily/monthly/weekly/yearly minutes: system checks that shifts assigned do not exceed the time indicated in the disposabilities daily/monthly/weekly/yearly (click here to read documentation about disposabilities)

  • Maximize consecutive shifts: this rule wants to combine consecutive hours as much as possible

  • Contract minimum minutes: rules needed to check if the minimum amount of hours required by contract is respected in the planning (expressed in minutes)

  • Garrison placements / No garrison placements: rules to respect Garrison Parameters entered in the spot. The first rule gives a reward, the other one gives a penalty if workshifts are inserted outside the indicated hours

  • Not rotation employee: when you use provision (linked to rotation concept), the system creates rotation workshifts; if in rotations you have assigned shifts to specific employees, even in provision week shifts will be assigned to these employees. But these shifts are not pinned, so if you use solve roster the assignment may change.
    For example if solve roster assigns shift X to John Doe but originally Emily Brown was the rotation employee, there is a penalty in score.

  • Undesired time slot: penalty to insert an undesired employee into the workshift

  • Desired time slot: system tries to insert desired timeslots indicated in employee section

 

What happens depending on the weight given to the various rules?

Obviously a rule with Hard Score counts more than a Medium Score one and a rule with Medium Score is more important than a Soft Score one.
Soft score is assigned to rules which give qualitative and not quantitative improvement. E.g. if in Employees section I enter desired/undesired availability (read here documentation), rule is soft because the algorithm accommodates these preferences if possible and it will try to respect desired/undesired preferences, unless it is necessary to enter as resources those particular employees into the shifts and this rule does not impact on the solution.

At the same time if there are different rules with the same weight (e.g. hard score) the one with the highest score value takes precedence in the algorithm calculation (hard 100 counts more than hard 20).

Scenario1

You have enabled two rules with same values but different weight:
assign every shift: Weight Medium Score - Value 100
required skill: Weight Hard Score - Value 100

Then you have to assign 2 workshifts and you have 2 employees:

  • John Doe with required skills

  • Sophia Moore without required skills

This is the best solution proposed by the algorithm:

1 workshift assigned to John Doe - 1 workshift unassigned
In fact with entered rules, it’s more important required skill rule (Hard Score 100) than assign every shift (Medium Score 100).

[The same scenario happens if you have two rules with same class but different values:
e.g. assign every shift: Hard Score 10 | required skill: Hard Score 100
Required skill always counts more than assign every shift so algorithm shows 1 workshift assign to employee with skills and 1 workshift unassigned]

Scenario2

You have enabled two rules with same values but different weight:
assign every shift: Weight Hard Score - Value 100
required skill: Weight Medium Score - Value 100

Then you have to assign 2 workshifts and you have 2 employees:

  • John Doe with required skills

  • Sophia Moore without required skills

This is the best solution proposed by the algorithm:

1 workshift assigned to John Doe - 1 workshift assigned to Sophia Moore
In fact with entered rules, it’s more important assign every shift (Hard Score 100) than insert employees with required skills (Medium Score 100).

If rules are not respected a penalty is given. If e.g. you have enabled rule Unavailable time slot - Hard 10 and the solution puts an unavailable employee in a slot, the algorithm calculates penalty, based on shift duration in minutes multiplied by rule weight (60x10 = penalty 600).

Algorithm sums all rules for all shifts and extracts a total score with the entries hard/medium/soft.

 

Score

From Scheduling section, after assigning shifts with the solve roster, you can check if there are some planning problems clicking on Score (you can find more information about planning problem in Overview section)

You can see a visualisation like that:

In this example, the algorithm indicates that:

  • not all shifts have been assigned

  • rotations have not been respected

  • in some cases the contractual maximum number of hours was exceeded.

If the algorithm shows planning problems like that, you can launch again Solve Roster in order to try to reset all or some problems (first of all minimise hard scores).

 

Moreover on a specific shift, it’s possible to see more information about broken rule, by clicking on 3 dots → info and you will view a box like this with the detail of score (hard/medium/soft) and the relative broken rule: