Generate a New Schedule

WFM uses input from a staffing plan to generate a schedule, whether you forecasted a staffing plan or used one you imported yourself. The created schedules appear in the Schedule Manager.

A generated schedule is based on several key pieces of data:

  • Staffing requirements - based on the staffing plan.
  • Organizational requirements - scheduling units, agents and their skills, weekly rules, etc.
  • User preferences - agent availability and shift preferences, as well as agent rank and seniority.

If two agents request the same shift, the one with the higher rank will have preference. If the agents have the same rank, the one with the greater seniority will have preference. If they also have the same seniority, the one who sent the first bid will have preference.

When you generate a new schedule, existing schedules during the selected time period will be overridden.

After generating a schedule, you still have to Publish it before your employees will see it.

To generate a new schedule:

  1. Click the app selector and select WFM.

  2. Go to Scheduling > Generate Schedule.

  3. Click Generate New Schedules.

  4. To generate multi-skill schedules, select the Use multi-skill scheduling checkbox. Multi-skill scheduling takes employee skills into account when creating schedules, and uses a forecast to simulate schedule needs. For more information, see Multi-Skill Scheduling Rules.

    If you select the multi-skill scheduling checkbox and do not have any employees assigned to multi-skill rules, then no schedules will be generated.

  5. Select Advance rotation if you are generating schedules with rotation rules and want to advance the rotation between employee schedules. For more information, see Rotation Rules.

  6. Select the Scheduling Units that you are generating a schedule for.

    You can select one or more units. Each unit's schedule will run as a separate job.

  7. Select a Start Date, and the duration of the schedule. You can generate a schedule for up to four weeks.

    Selecting the duration automatically provides the end date of the schedule.

  8. Choose the Staffing Plan.

    • For Manual Planning, select a previously imported CSV file.

    • For Automatic Planning, select a staffing plan generated by Forecasting.

  9. Click Generate.

    Generating a schedule can take a while. Therefore, the Automatic Schedule Generator page will run through a series of validations first, to make sure your schedule doesn't have any conflicts or problems you didn't anticipate.

  10. If your schedule has errors, the Status will appear as Validation failed. You can click on the View Errors link to open the Error Summary page.

  11. Use the Error Summary page to go back and double check your daily and weekly rules and fix the conflicts in your schedule.  

  12. Go back to the Automatic Schedule Generator page, and click the Try Again button in the schedule line.

    Existing schedules during the selected time period will be overridden when you generate the new schedule. In addition, schedules for dates without any forecast data will not reflect demand requirements. In both cases, you can choose to generate the schedule anyway.

Depending on the complexity of the schedule, generating it may take several minutes, but you can view the status of the job in the Automatic Schedule Generator page.

Only once the job has finished running will the schedule be added to the Schedule Manager.

Remember to publish the schedule if you want to send it out to your employees.