People
- Skills, tickets and certifications, with expiry dates respected
- Shift patterns, part time hours, annual leave and sickness
- Statutory rest, maximum stretch, and agreed working limits
- Pairing rules, such as a trainee never sent alone
Home/Scheduling systems
What gets built
A scheduling system, not a calendar with colours.
A calendar records decisions. A scheduling system makes them, holds every rule while it does, and explains the result. That difference decides whether the plan survives contact with a Tuesday.
Constraints
Rules the system holds at the same time.
Scheduling gets hard because the rules pull against each other. Handling one well is easy. Handling all of them together is the job.
Time and place
- Travel time between locations, not a flat allowance
- Access windows, site opening hours, and booked slots
- Job order, where one task cannot start until another finishes
- Set-up and clear-down time counted as real work
Kit and stock
- Shared equipment that two jobs cannot both hold
- Vehicles, bays and rooms treated as scheduled resources
- Parts on hand, with a job held rather than started and stalled
- Calibration and servicing windows blocked in advance
Priority and promises
- Contracted response times, with the clock visible
- Urgent work inserted without wrecking the settled day
- Fair spread of unpopular jobs across the team
- A recorded reason whenever the system moves something
Model under load
Push it until it breaks, then read what it says.
A system earns trust by being honest at the limit. Raise the demand past what the teams can absorb and this model names the jobs it cannot place, rather than quietly squeezing them in.
Long day, 09:00 to 19:00
Rules
Capacity
- Jobs placed
- --
- Last finish
- --
- Team utilisation
- --
- Model solve
- -- ms
Standard Priority Urgent
Demonstration model. Every number here gets computed on this page, and none of it describes client work.
Schedule assignments as text
Turn off job order
Utilisation climbs and the finish time drops, because the model stops waiting on predecessors. Tidier, and wrong, if the work really does have an order.
Cut the teams to two
Watch the day stretch past the horizon and jobs fall out. That number is the honest cost of a thin rota, visible before the week starts.
Permit extended hours
Capacity appears, and the striped blocks show precisely which jobs bought it. Nothing gets hidden in an average.
Interfaces
It has to sit inside the tools already in use.
| Connection | Approach |
|---|---|
| Calendars | Standard iCalendar feeds, so a schedule lands in the tool a team already opens each morning. |
| Existing systems | Documented HTTP interfaces with versioning, so an upgrade on either side does not break the other. |
| Data exchange | Open formats such as CSV and JSON, exportable in full, at any time, with no charge for leaving. |
| Notifications | Email and messaging hooks, triggered by real schedule events rather than a timer. |
| Reporting | Read access to the underlying data, so the business builds its own views without asking. |
Delivery
What a build includes.
- A written rule set, agreed line by line before any code gets committed
- The scheduling engine, tested against weeks the business has already worked
- A planner view for the person who runs the day, built for speed and not for show
- Interfaces to the systems named at the start, with the specification published
- Admin training, plain English documentation, and the rules in a file anyone can read
- A support window after go-live, with the scope written down rather than implied
Describe the week that keeps going wrong.
A short call is enough to tell whether a scheduling system helps, or whether a smaller change gets you most of the way.