Deputy’s New Feature Seeks to Streamline Shift Scheduling

Restaurant Kitchen

Workforce-management platform provider Deputy released a new feature, Auto-Scheduling, that allows businesses to more easily create and maintain compliant schedules for hourly workers across industries such as restaurants, healthcare, staffing and franchises.

Of course, the feature is AI-powered, Deputy said. It uses AI to build schedules based on analytics from data compiled from areas like sales, foot traffic numbers and table reservations. With that information, Auto-Scheduling forecasts demand and creates a schedule to make sure each shift is staffed with adequately staffed in terms of both workers and skills. In the company’s words, it “creates a custom labor recipe that puts the best person in place for every shift, based on scheduling rules customized to businesses’ priorities.”

Forced analogies aside, Deputy’s CEO, Ashik Ahmed, made a good point when he said, “There’s too much complexity and too little time to consider everything that goes into creating a workforce’s schedule, including labor laws, predictive scheduling laws and employee scheduling conflicts, not to mention time and cost optimizations for each shift.”

Trying to fit those pieces together manually ends up costing businesses time and money because the process is inefficient and the results “suboptimal,” he said. And besides operational issues, this creates compliance risk.

Auto-Scheduling is designed to help businesses operate with up-to-date information on scheduling regulations. One of its obvious targets seems to be franchises and fast-food outlets, both notoriously difficult businesses to schedule.

Auto-Scheduling requires users to add rules based on their company’s regulations, then employs them to allow flexibility in scheduling so managers can accommodate requests for preferred shift lengths and start times, among other things. Its Auto-Fill tool has the ability to “copy and learn” from previous shifts, allowing schedules to be set with one click once the system gets going.

The feature also allows business owners and managers to set priorities such as cost and matching past preferences, which has the potential to eliminate much of the back-and-forth that goes on after schedules are initially posted.

Deputy says it’s products are used in about 70,000 workplaces from the large (Amazon) to the SMB (MakeSpace).

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