A new era is dawning where artificial intelligence (AI) will solve many of the complex problems humans are confronted with. Workforce scheduling is one of those. If you know that for an average McDonald’s restaurant with 30 employees and about 150 shifts, the number of possible team schedules is a multitude of the number of atoms in the complete universe (10^220 possible combinations to be exact), then calling in the help from AI to pick the best possible version is the logical thing to do.
Workforce management tool Strobbo has built AI scheduling into their scheduling tool and used the know-how of Solvice to power this feature.
This is how AI scheduling works:
- Both store managers and employees enter preferences (e.g., availability) and skills in the system.
- This information is combined with labor rules and how the company wants to work. Think of shift lengths, breaks, time between shifts, starting and ending times, extra time and how much that costs, etc.
- The only thing left to do now is to tell the system what capacity will be needed over a certain period of time—that is, a forecast of needed resources per profile per hour.
- With all of his information available, one click of a button is enough to launch the AI engine (the solver):
- The system will now start looking for the most optimal solution. As mentioned before, the number of theoretically possible solutions is enormous. Calculating each one of those would take even the fastest computer in the world hundreds of years. That is where AI comes in. Smart algorithms will pre-select those scenarios that have the highest chance of being optimal, calculate them and evaluate them against each other.
- The result is a schedule that is with a certainty of more than 95% the most optimal solution. All of this is done within a few minutes.
- The finishing touch is again done by the person managing the schedule.
As you can see, AI is not replacing humans in this process. It simply makes it possible to make informed decisions in immensely complex issues allowing for all preferences (of both employer and employee) to be taken into account. All of this can be done without spending hours away from the shop floor where the action is. On top of that, AI planning brings consistency and avoids mistakes in scheduling, which is crucial for both efficiency and employee satisfaction..
Today, AI scheduling by Stobbo is scheduling over 10000 working hours every week. More importantly, the time a typical manager spends on scheduling tasks is reduced by 80%, leaving time to be close to the team and customers. No wonder this feature has won the “Technology Innovation Award" at Horeca Expo 2023.
Learn more about AI scheduling by Strobbo here:
https://strobbo.com/be-nl/oplossingen/add-ons/
Take a deep dive in the world of AI and resource scheduling:
Workforce Scheduling and Rostering
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