Scheduling can be a pain, particularly for employees with irregular schedules, frequent schedule changes, and strict regulatory or union compliance requirements. A few that come to mind immediately are healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and food service, and retail. In these industries, managers spend a lot of time trying to get scheduling right, but employees frequently feel disempowered and unhappy with the results, anyway. 

Many solutions to these problems come up short. Standalone scheduling tools typically require complex integrations, which are expensive to build and maintain. And they depend on a regular (usually nightly) synch of data across systems that almost ensures information will not be accurate in some of the systems. This forces managers and employees to make poor decisions and increases the risk of compliance problems.

Substandard solutions also don’t take advantage of opportunities to empower workers, who desperately want choice and more flexible, predictable schedules—and value employers who offer this; and they fail to free managers to spend more time on strategic initiatives instead of shuffling schedules. Executives, HR, and operations teams are left managing the fallout of lower employee satisfaction and higher attrition.  

Now, Oracle Workforce Scheduling can provide a different approach.

A better way to schedule

Oracle Workforce Scheduling, part of Workforce Management in Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, connects data from across your organization in a unified scheduling solution. Since it uses the same technical foundation and data as Fusion Apps, it’s inherently integrated, which links time, labor, scheduling, and leave management with payroll, financial, and personnel data. Many useful things are possible because of this, including:

  • Easier and better compliance with labor laws, regulations, union rules, and work contracts: The system can force compliance with scheduling guardrails, for example, preventing healthcare workers with expired credentials from working shifts they aren’t qualified for, ensuring M / W / F employees are only scheduled on those days, or offering first dibs on shifts to employees based on seniority as required by union rules or company policy.
  • Pay rate information can inform scheduling decisions: Managers can see the financial impact of assigning workers to different roles, and they can be confident that pay rate changes will be calculated correctly by the time and labor tracking in Oracle Cloud HCM—and fed directly to your payroll.
  • AI Assist helps managers and employees understand labor policies in the scheduling flow: GenAI provides specific, contextualized, rapid responses to questions, which can reduce policy violations and the burden on managers, payroll administrators, HR, and Labor Relations to address questions and grievances.
  • Built-in analytics provide insights—and improvement over time: Analytics capabilities come out of the box, making it possible to easily create reports from scheduling data. By the end of the year, prebuilt scheduling KPIs and trend analysis metrics will be available as part of Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics.
  • Better manager and employee experiences: A unified scheduling solution—available across all devices—reduces the number of tools needed to complete HR tasks, which can improve productivity, communication, and engagement. (See more below about employee-driven self-scheduling.)

How does it work?

There are three ways Workforce Scheduling can help. All of them provide the benefits mentioned above that come from being part of a unified HCM platform—i.e., adhering to laws, regulations, rules, preferences, and both leveraging and updating relevant data in other parts of the system.

First, managers get access to a modern application to plan and publish work schedules for individuals or groups of workers. It includes visibility into absences, holidays, and real-time clock information, plus the ability to manage timekeeping from a single screen. And it provides helpful guidance, such as indicating days or shifts that are understaffed and recommending the best-fit team members to fill open slots.

In addition, Oracle offers full, employee-driven self-scheduling—a rarity. Managers can open designated shifts for self-service scheduling based on various criteria (e.g., seniority), and workers can view schedules, claim shifts, withdraw from shifts, and swap shifts with colleagues. They can also easily update their availability, change work preferences, and manage absences from any device.

Workforce Labor Optimization—an optional add-on to Workforce Scheduling—makes it possible to leverage AI to create optimized schedules (to be reviewed, edited as needed, and approved by the manager). It evaluates how many workers are required on specific days and times. Then, it automatically creates the best-length shifts and suggests assignments based on seniority, competencies, certifications, and availability.

In summary

The best way to drive compliance, offer employees the choices they want, and free up managers for higher value work is to use a scheduling solution that’s part of your core HCM system. With these the new scheduling and labor optimization capabilities in Oracle Cloud HCM, you can better plan—and respond to changes—to create schedules that really work for your company, its employees and managers, and ultimately, your customers.

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