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The scheduler is a proprietary optimizer designed to
deal with the unique aspects of the retail industry.
An optimizer creates a solution (schedules) that
maximizes an objective function (coverage) subject to constraints (employee
characteristics).
An optimizer that maximizes the wrong objective
function, or creates a set of schedules that is not acceptable to your
employees is no optimizer at all.
The Q/SERV schedule generator first re-calculates
staffing requirements based on the budgeted hours and costs contained in the
plan. The output of this re-calculation is a set of 'Target' staffing
requirements by function for each quarter hour of the scheduling period. The
targets are the objective for the optimizer.
The optimizer then composes employee schedules that
minimize the difference between the Target coverage and the Scheduled
coverage. In doing so the optimizer satisfies a comprehensive set of
employee constraints including minimum and maximum hours, shift length
limits, shift composition rules (e.g., at least two closing shifts per
week), consecutive days worked, availability, and proficiency.
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