If your company uses the Autoscheduler but has some employees who have fixed patterns, you can use the Shift Patterns feature in unison with the Autoscheduler.
For any employees who have a full shift pattern which equals their contracted hours and they do not need to have any additional hours, they need to be excluded from the Autoscheduler on the people page.
For any employees who only have partial fixed shifts e.g. two days a week, you would want to apply the shift pattern first and then the Autoscheduler will create their additional shifts around what you have applied.
Applying the shift pattern first:
In order to apply a shift pattern to the scheduler, navigate to the scheduler and press Tools > Apply Shift Pattern.
Select the location and the pattern you wish to apply. You then need to choose the start and end weeks you want to apply the pattern to.
For a single week pattern, it will apply the same weekly pattern every week until the end date. For a rotating pattern, it will rotate your employees/weeks until the end date.
Finally, select the employee(s) you want to apply it to and the week the pattern will start for this employee. If it's a single week pattern, you only need one line and to start the pattern on week 1.
Once the pattern has been applied, you will see it for the people and dates you have chosen.
Running the Autoscheduler:
Once your shift pattern(s) have been applied, you can now run the autoscheduler.
Remember, whatever shifts you have previously added already come out of any budgets and forecasts that are needed within your location as the Autoscheduler will work around these shifts.
As you can see above, for Friday, the 1 shift Sharon is working has already been taken from the demand graph. This means the Autoscheduler will work around this shift and schedule one less 'on shift' to meet the demand.
When you're ready, click 'Autoscheduler' in the top right hand corner. This will ask you to confirm the location, date range, users and budget. Click 'Run' and the Autoscheduler will run and produce you a schedule.
Autoscheduler Output:
Once the Autoscheduler has been run, you will be able to see the output and what has been scheduled for each employee. This will have taken into count the pre-scheduled shifts from shift patterns.
If you want to make any manual adjustements after, you can do so in the normal way by selecting the entry to change times, task or delete and add new shifts. Once you have made any manual changes, all you need to do then is click Approve to finalise the schedule.