Workforce Scheduling Archives - Page 4 of 7

The importance of scheduling prison officers across the UK prison system

Posted on: 15 April 2022

Scheduling in prisons is vital across the entire infrastructure. Scheduling officers to rotas, scheduling inmates to activities and then monitoring and reporting on all activities opens a whole new level of insight. At present, much of the scheduling in the UK prison system is a box ticking exercise based on availability. But what if it could be more than that?

Assigning staff and inmates to jobs and activities is only one side of the coin. The other is data analysis and understanding. Has the best use of an officer’s skills and experience been made? Are prisoners involved in suitable activities? What are the outcomes of the decisions made?

This blog takes a closer look at the benefits of scheduling staff and prisoners across the prison system. How can having a central system, offering a bird’s eye view of the entire network, work to the benefit of the system? How can it underpin an improvement in outcomes for everyone?

Prison officers

Fundamental to the running of any prison are the staff who work there. Understanding the skills and experience of the prison officer workforce is the first step. Having a holistic view of the officers in a single prison, as well as the wider prison network, instantly provides a view of the entire workforce.

Being able to factor in the skills and experience of a prison officer instantly means that schedulers and administrative staff can assign tasks not only quickly, but more appropriately. Randomly assigning officers to tasks within a prison fails to best utilise their skills and experiences. Different prisoner profiles require different approaches. Considering an officer’s preferences when assigning them to jobs is likely to improve morale, too. If an officer has worked closely with certain profiles, e.g. offenders struggling with substance abuse, and has experienced success in that area, it makes sense to utilise those skills and that experience appropriately.

According to statistics from Statista, the number of prison officers working in England and Wales has fallen by 3,000 since 2010. This means that it is crucial that prison officers are appropriately assigned to role. Guesswork leads to mistakes and disillusionment.

It is also an issue which the Ministry of Justice is acutely aware of. In its December 2021 white paper, Prisons Strategy White Paper, the MoJ outlines its intention to boost prison officer numbers by some 5000 by the mid-2020s. Retention is another key aspect of the MoJ’s staffing intentions, to tackle a leaving rate of 11.1% in the year preceding 30 September 2021. “Enhancing professional skills: improved training, supervision and qualifications,” is central to this.

Technology can help. Not only can it instantly match skills and experience to available roles, it can also inform the training needs of the prison guards, thereby enhancing professional skills. Mandatory ongoing training is a prerequisite, but what about expanding training management efforts to open new skills and experiences to the workforce? This has the twin advantages of increasing the skills available across the prison, whilst also offering career enhancing opportunities to staff. A deeper pool of resources across your existing workforce is useful in times of strain, something we’ve seen during the Covid pandemic.

This also ties in with creating a broader understanding of the prison population. The population is transient by nature in certain prisons. Having oversight of the profile of prisoner in the facility enables better provision of resources to their needs. For example, matching prison officers with experience of dealing with and helping inmates with substance addiction.

Prison inmates

As the focus of any prison, understanding the needs of each prisoner helps to improve outcomes for them during their sentence. What makes for a good outcome? Hopefully a successful rehabilitation of the offender. Reoffending costs some £18bn.

Management and scheduling of prison activities is central to their success. The need for demand modelling is also clear. What profile of prisoner is in the prison at a given moment, and what courses and activities are required and how will spaces be allocated? The management of this can be complex. There are staffing resources, rooms and equipment to be factored in. Activities can clash, so what’s the order of priority for a prisoner? Managing waiting lists for activities is another consideration. Then there’s scheduling prisoners, where applicable, to tasks within the prison. You need to consider the jobs they need to carry out, as well as their activities.

All of this requires careful assessment and management. Prison staff resources must be allocated to the necessary background checks and assessments. Then those staff need allocating to the activities as appropriate.

Where this can be further complicated is the need to factor in a prisoner’s attendance at court. Prisoners need to attend their relevant hearings, and, in some cases, they must be escorted to and from court by prison staff. Understanding the impact of having staff off site for such visits must also be factored into the overarching prison schedule.

Prisons must also consider external visitors. From those delivering training courses to lawyers visiting inmates, all activities and their participants need to be carefully monitored and provisioned for. Each prison has its own interpretation of the rules around visits, so a degree of flexibility is required. There is also a need to communicate visiting hours with friends and relatives who wish to visit inmates.

Conclusion

Scheduling within prisons is a complex affair. There are several moving parts and resources can be strained. Having a system in place to provide a holistic view of activities, staff and prisoners can significantly help.

Understanding the skills and experience of your staff, then matching that to the needs and profile of your prisoners can help to drive improved outcomes for all parties. Leaving this to guesswork and random scheduling based solely on availability fails to make the best and most efficient use of available resources.

A central system enables schedulers and administrative staff to instantly account for each scenario. This removes the guesswork from scheduling and auto-matches the supply of staff and their skills and experiences, to the demands of the prison population.

It also facilitates effective reporting on activities, the prison population and demand forecasting going forward. Rather than being reactive to changes and scheduling, it facilitates a proactive outlook based around supply and demand.

Automation of scheduling in certain circumstances also frees up time to focus on planning. In an environment where time is so often at a premium, this can deliver tangible benefits to the training, activities and management of a prison.

The focus, however, is always on outcomes. Improving outcomes for staff and inmates alike results in a more efficient – and more effective – prison.

For more information on how Cygnum can underpin your workforce, planning and training requirements, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Effective workforce management – recruitment

Posted on: 7 February 2022

Staff turnover is an inevitability in any business. As is, hopefully, business growth. When a business expands, new recruits are needed to fulfil an expanding list of tasks. Pinpointing the skills and experience required, however, can be a challenge. It can make recruitment difficult for any organisation. So, how can you best tackle recruitment, conducting it seamlessly for the smooth running of your services?

Understanding is the vital ingredient. It’s one thing knowing that you need to bring people in, but it’s a different challenge being able to swiftly pinpoint the skills and experience required to best serve your business needs. Having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce can help.

Knowledge driving recruitment

If you have a central system that holds all the information on your workforce, it makes the task of understanding the skills, experience and competencies available to you straightforward. You can easily run reports and gain vital insight. In industries such as construction, transport and healthcare, core competencies are vital in delivering frontline services. For example, if you have a low or dwindling number of staff appropriately qualified to administer injections, it gives you an opportunity to react before service delivery is impacted.

Now, this can of course be done internally via training programmes as we touched upon in our previous blog. The same holistic view of training and competencies across your organisation is vital in making informed recruitment decisions, too.

Where staff cannot be upskilled internally, it makes recruitment inevitable. Using a central system can make the task easier for management teams responsible for recruitment, by being able to identify specific skills and experience that are needed across the organisation. Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game and shouldn’t be left to chance.

How long will the recruitment process take?

Another crucial aspect is understanding how long the recruitment process will take. Managers will need to take time out from their usual tasks to conduct interviews; what’s the knock-on effect of this? There’s also a cost implication in terms of not having enough staff available and in terms of the shifting of resources to the recruitment process.

Diverting resources is obviously a big undertaking, so understanding the consequences upon your resources, time and budgets is fundamental. Having a central view of your workforce will again help in this regard, helping to map out your resources and their allocation.

Post recruitment

Once the recruitment phase is completed and you have new staff signed up, what happens next? The first aspect is once again linked to your competency management efforts. If someone says they have certain qualifications, particularly in safety critical environments it is a good idea to check. Evidencing certificates and obtaining references can be completed by the new staff member, with the copies then stored against their record in your system. This means that you will have oversight of their skills, qualifications and experience for the duration of their time with you. This will help your scheduling teams in being able to appropriately assign tasks to them.

Once you’re satisfied that they are appropriately qualified, they will then need to be enrolled into your organisation and the teams with which they will be working. This process may include mandatory health and safety training for new starters. Assigning this and making sure it’s completed can be done centrally, with any result again being stored against their record. This can trigger alerts for when any refresher training might be required in future, too.

Most jobs have a probationary period, something that extends beyond safety critical work and helps to ensure that people are up to the job for which you have employed them for. Similarly, it enables employees the opportunity to leave with shorter notice if they decide the job isn’t for them.

Keeping track of this probationary period is crucial. Assessments and feedback of their work will help to make informed decisions on whether or not they have passed. Storing all of this information centrally helps to give your organisation a complete view of its workforce.

Once a new recruit is up and running, they will hopefully be in a position to fulfil their tasks in the way needed. Seeing them become a regular part of your workforce asap is beneficial to service delivery. This requires careful planning and oversight of your organisation.

What specific skills and experience does your organisation need? Who will be required to recruit? How much time will be needed? What processes are in place to get new starters up and running? All of these questions can be answered when you have a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce. By linking training and competency management, you can make more informed and accurate decisions.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

A more efficient system to reduce duplicate inspections in UK farming

Posted on: 27 January 2022

The farming landscape is one of the most heavily scrutinised industries in the UK. Regulatory bodies inspect how farms protect, enhance and preserve the environment, control diseases and pests in animals and plants, protect trees and woodland and control subsidies. The landscape is changing, too.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive has recently been announced, set to be rolled out with the addition of standards all the way through to 2025. Farmers will be able to choose as many and whichever standards they like. Better performance against each one, i.e. producing more environmental benefits, will result in higher payment. This is all part of DEFRA’s efforts to invest in the environment, productivity, farmer resilience, plant and tree health and animal welfare.

Initially, in 2022, three standards will be available; two pertaining to soil and moorlands, one to livestock farming. More standards will follow, as outlined in this DEFRA Future Farming blog. To manage these schemes going forward and validate payments, farmers will have to apply for reviews. This means that keeping abreast of inspections will be vital for both farmers and the bodies inspecting them.

These changes do, however, represent an opportunity. Where farmers have received visits from various bodies at various times, there is an opportunity to coordinate the inspection of farms across the disparate bodies that inspect them. This is particularly important when looking at cross compliance and not disproportionally penalising a farmer for non-compliance in one area.

Having a central database of all inspections and their outcomes will facilitate a far more efficient system. Inspections, at present, are siloed into the bodies conducting them. Linking these bodies together and enabling them to review the outcomes of each other’s inspections, will greatly help them and the farmers.

A number of the inspections conducted on farms are similar in nature. Preserving the environment, protecting trees and woodland, for example, are similar elements. Merging the inspections for these, as far as it’s possible to do so, will reduce the need for multiple inspectors to be onsite at a farm. Using trusted data from another body to fulfil part of your own organisation’s inspection mandate is a much more efficient way of conducting the inspections. Less time spent onsite, same result. This will greatly reduce duplication for farmers.

It also makes sense for the inspectors. Farms are big properties that take time to navigate, necessitating sometimes lengthy visits. This reduces the ability of inspectors to conduct multiple inspections in a day. If, however, information can be used from another trusted body, this will help to reduce inspection times and open up the possibility of an inspector carrying out multiple inspections in a working day. This will help to facilitate inspections of more farms in the same time frame.

Correct use of technology systems can also help to schedule inspections more efficiently. If an inspector is in a particular area, for example, it makes sense to schedule them in and around that locality to reduce dead time spent travelling.

Marrying the capture of inspection outcomes to more rules-based scheduling of the inspection activity will help inspectors and farmers alike. Reducing the amount of duplication makes life easier for all parties.

Automation is another facet of scheduling and inspections that modern technology can bring to farming and associated inspections. Being able to automatically schedule an inspection and notify the farm reduces the need for manual interventions by staff responsible for arranging inspections. This feeds into follow-up tasks, too.

Where an inspection identifies an area for improvement or re-inspection, these follow-up tasks can be automatically created at the point of them being recorded. This leaves scheduling staff with more time to focus on exceptions.

Technology allows the scheduling of an inspector to be decided on fairly using a myriad of factors. For example, geographical proximity to a farm, or inspections being conducted nearby to other farms with similar needs, or the skills, specialisms, continuity and availability of the inspector.

Technology can also enable inspectors to capture their outcomes in real-time. By equipping inspectors with handheld devices, results can be entered through mobile forms and stored immediately, rather than having to spend additional time writing up the entire visit later. This means that reporting on and understanding an inspection, and any associated follow-up tasks, can be done instantly. Farmers will benefit as this can also speed up the post inspection processes and payment processing.

If outcomes from a different inspection can be factored in, too, these can be included in any report, instantly saving time.

The layers of complexity in the process of conducting farm inspections in the UK can be greatly eased by the correct deployment of technology. A single system enables inspectors to view their schedules and make their reports, whilst at the same time notifying farmers about upcoming inspections and the results of previous ones.

This efficiency will alleviate much of the duplication currently experienced by UK farmers. It will also make the changing regulatory landscape easier to navigate for everyone. A single, transparent source of truth will work to the benefit of everyone.

The notion of a single system and a single point of regulatory contact is an issue that we explored in our previous blog, Why England’s farmer inspectors are launching a war on duplication, which you can read here.

Effective workforce management – the importance of scheduling

Posted on: 17 January 2022

Scheduling is the glue that keeps organisations together. It provides clarity over tasks to be completed and helps management teams in looking back to see what has been achieved. Who performed what tasks and when? How did they do? In times of employee strain, when workforces are stretched – something we’ve seen a lot of during Covid – having an agile scheduling tool is vital for firms in keeping their projects and services running. Without a robust scheduling framework, organisations are at the mercy of guesswork and good fortune.

Scheduling pervades every aspect of company life. At a basic level, the majority of working contracts outline expected hours along the lines of the 9-5 theme. From there, employees are expected to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Staying on top of individuals is easy enough, but what if you have an entire workforce to assign tasks to and track? In industries such as healthcare, transport and construction, project completion and service delivery are dependent upon the input of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of staff members.

In such organisations, a central administrative team needs to assign tasks to employees to ensure that projects and services can be delivered effectively and efficiently. It can be akin to moving chess pieces around a board, using different pieces in different ways to attack the tasks at hand. From time to time you also need to go on the defensive, when projects overrun, or services are disrupted.

To fill your tasks, an understanding of what each employee is competent in is vital. You can’t use a knight to do a bishop’s job, to labour the chess analogy. Manually researching who can step in to fill a role is a painstaking process. It’s also a waste of time, since with a robust scheduling system, it is something that can be done automatically.

Quickly filtering through employees and instantly understanding their training, competencies and experiences facilitates swift and efficient decision making. Further understanding of their existing schedule enables administrators to assign tasks within business rules and legally contractable hours.

By setting out schedules in advance, organisations can clearly communicate with their employees and enable them due oversight of their shifts and tasks. Within a centralised scheduling system, it is also possible to facilitate the swapping of schedules between staff members to provide flexibility.

Your business rules, your scheduling

Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.

Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.

External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.

Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.

Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.

This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.

Be agile in the face of change

Navigating a global pandemic has been challenging for all and sundry. With various periods of lockdown, mandatory self-isolation and people contracting Covid-19, assigning tasks and keeping services running has been a case of swimming against the tide at times.

There have been cases at airports where entire security and baggage handling teams have been taken out, and Northern Rail had to cancel services when too many staff members were forced into isolation. These have been exceptional times, but it is possible to navigate them effectively.

With a single view of the workforce, it makes it easier to manoeuvre people and keep services running. If the worst does happen, it at least facilitates swift decision making and clear communications with end users of your services. Without a central view and the help of automation, scheduling in times of stress is time intensive and manual at best; guesswork at worst.

Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation

Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.

It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.

Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

How competency management can underpin your workforce safety efforts

Posted on: 4 November 2021

Competency management may sound like a basic construct in the world of safety-critical work. Employees are hired, they prove that they are appropriately trained and qualified for their role and off you go. Being qualified and competent at the commencement of a role is only one aspect of competency management; a robust framework is required to ensure that all staff receive ongoing support, assessments, training and guidance for their tasks. Complying with safety protocols depends upon it.

Understanding your workforce

Having a central record and database of your workforce enables you to keep track of who is competent at what. In times of strain, for example where there might be a number of absentees at short notice (something we’ve seen regularly during the Covid pandemic with people having to self-isolate), it is crucial that you can be nimble in assigning tasks across your workforce to keep services running and projects on track.

A single view of competencies required for tasks and competencies across your workforce facilitates flexible decision making. Staff can be reassigned across your organisation, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately skilled and competent for the task at hand, whilst remaining compliant with health and safety regulations applicable to the organisation. An easily accessible record of hours staff have worked, for example, must be maintained. Fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the rail sector and can affect staff competencies to perform their tasks. Jobs should not be allocated to staff when they have not had the required amount of rest or they will exceed a safe number of hours to work.

Central record keeping is also useful for identifying skills gaps. Where such gaps are identified, this can trigger a workflow regarding training of staff in your existing workforce and can be linked to your organisation’s recruitment efforts. This further helps to ensure that your workforce has adequate competencies to fulfil the tasks across your organisation.

Safety first

In safety critical environments, competency management can be particularly important in order to comply with safety regulations. It is vital that your workforce is regularly assessed and observed, and that where ongoing training for a role is required, it is delivered, attended and passed.

For example first aider certificates last for three years, although the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommend that refresher training is conducted annually. Most working environments require the presence of trained first aiders, so it is important that administrators ensure that there are sufficiently competent personnel to perform the role.

In more safety intensive environments, for example trackside work on the rail network, it is vital that all members of the workforce receive appropriate safety training and briefings to understand their equipment and environment on an ongoing basis.

Ensuring that safety briefings are delivered is crucial and then, when incidents do occur, so is the recording of them, including near misses. With a log of all activities, from briefings to incidents, it makes it much easier to gain a full view of workforce safety and to understand why incidents have occurred. This can then trigger follow-up activities such as observations, assessments and the implementation of remedial training where necessary.

Upskilling your workforce’s competencies

Having a central log of information also makes life easier for your workforce to understand their training and assessment obligations, whilst also opening up and suggesting new training opportunities to them. This helps them with their career development and helps you with broadening the competencies available to you across your organisation.

Ongoing training is a prerequisite in some roles, so using a supporting competency management software tool can help you with auto-allocation of mandatory courses and sending notifications to staff members of training opportunities relevant to them.

Where potential skills gaps are identified, you can recommend relevant courses to your workforce to encourage them to broaden their competencies, making your workforce more flexible and agile in the face of unforeseen shortfalls in staff numbers. This feeds directly into responding to short-term incidents such as self-isolation arising from Covid by equipping you with the knowledge of your workforce that facilitates quick fixes where they are necessary.

A bird’s eye view

With all competencies across your workforce logged, it is much easier to allocate relevant tasks to people in a timely and even automated fashion. A bird’s eye view of your entire workforce makes decision making much easier.

The deployment of the correct technology is crucial to this. Moving away from manually intensive processes such as spreadsheets and phone calls, to having all the relevant information made available to the relevant decision makers in an automated fashion creates great efficiencies in your competency management processes, making it simple to understand who is competent at what.

This carries over benefits to your scheduling, training and, crucially, safety protocols. It’s one thing having appropriately competent staff members when they join your organisation, but updating and upskilling their core competencies keeps your entire organisation on track in a more harmonious manner.

Having a central log of all activities and incidents also makes it much easier to schedule the necessary assessments and observations of your workforce. This central log also makes it easier to identify trends and understand why incidents occur.

Ultimately, keeping your workforce appropriately trained and competent for the tasks which they are assigned to undertake carries huge benefits to your safety efforts. If staff are being assigned to tasks for which they are not appropriately competent, accidents are more likely to occur. Having a clear evidence base and bird’s eye view of your entire workforce helps to comply with safety protocols and keep your projects moving.

For a more detailed look at improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, please take a look at our free white paper on the topic.

The role of rostering in workforce safety

Posted on: 3 November 2021

Scheduling your workforce goes beyond simply ensuring that tasks are being performed by certain members of staff. Of course, fulfilling tasks is a minimum requirement, but having a holistic view of your workforce, its specific skills, competencies and experience can help you to drive deeper understanding. It is also critical in understanding hours worked, where further training is required and in giving management relevant information on each staff member.

This links back to workforce safety, too. Simply by understanding hours worked and hours planned, makes it much easier to comply with fatigue management protocols for workers in safety critical environments. With real time information from out in the field recorded into a single system, overtime and over-running tasks can also be considered as and when they occur and dealt with accordingly. This includes communicating delays in good time and understanding the workforce implications on overlapping and future tasks.

Responding to short term changes

With a central pool of information to call upon, schedulers can begin to automate swathes of their scheduling, with a rules engine matching staff members to tasks based upon specific criteria. This allows scheduling and administrative teams time to focus on more cumbersome areas such as exceptions and reacting to short-term changes in the workforce.

Short-term changes have been brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic, with the need for people to self-isolate upon coming into close contact with anyone who has contracted the illness, or having to isolate upon receipt of notification from the NHS app. This has led to scenarios where entire teams have been out of action; something of a challenge in scheduling staff and meeting deadlines.

This was brought into focus for Northern Rail, which experienced a number of positive Covid tests across its workforce, with other colleagues having to isolate as a result of contact with them. The company had to issue a warning to passengers that services would be disrupted.

With a holistic view of your workforce, it’s much easier to see who is available to step into a role, based on their experience, qualifications and other tasks they are expected to perform. This helps to create a more fluid and efficient scheduling system that also enables you to put safety front and centre of the whole process.

It also helps to understand who has been in contact with whom, which can further help with workforce safety regarding Covid. If necessary, like Northern Rail, having a complete understanding of the workforce enables swift decision making as regards the need to amend timetables and cancel services. Having flexibility in such times is crucial to being able to make the right decision for the safety of the workforce and the smooth running of services.

Who can fill in where?

Competency management also has a big role to play here, in tandem with scheduling. It enables schedulers, where necessary, to consider personnel from other areas of the organisation who might be able to help with other tasks. Having the support of a system with a holistic view of your workforce also removes the element of human error in assigning tasks to other people.

This rounded view of competencies and skills can also facilitate the reintegration of staff members who have been isolating or have been off work. Where a colleague has stepped in to cover their tasks, they can be reassigned to other teams. Their return to work can be planned in, ensuring that appropriate protocols have been accounted for and that they’ve supplied things such as a negative Covid test before returning to work.

Rostering solutions to help

In these highly complex and fluid scenarios, a robust rostering solution is paramount in order to keep projects moving and to maintain workforce safety, with the need to be able to adapt at short notice and make best use of available staffing resources.

The deployment of a rostering solution facilitates the central recording and all-encompassing view of the entire workforce. With aspects such as auto-scheduling and auto-allocation of tasks, it frees up schedulers’ time to work on exceptions and deal with issues as and when they arise. As we’ve seen, it helps to be in a strong position to react to unforeseen circumstances.

CACI’s Cygnum software is designed to do all of this. We help transport operators to schedule their workforce and understand their resources, bringing scheduling, training and competency management together in one place. This helps to not only schedule and understand workforce patterns, but to implement training and move staff around to fulfil tasks as necessary.

Our white paper on improving workforce safety in the rail industry further explores the ways in which technology can help organisations to maximise workforce efficiency whilst implementing high safety standards. It is free to view here.

Effectively managing your fatigue management process

Posted on: 26 August 2021

Fatigue management protocols are commonplace in labour intensive industries which require prolonged periods of physical or mental exertion. If you’ve got engineers or drivers keeping services moving, their working hours need to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that they don’t become fatigued, thereby impairing their ability to perform to the best of their abilities. Providing appropriate rest breaks during shifts and ensuring that they get enough time to rest in between is paramount. So, how can management teams effectively manage this process and ensure that workers are getting enough rest and adhering to your company’s fatigue management protocols?

The role of management

The role of management is fundamental to ensuring that fatigue management procedures are in place, first and foremost. There are usually industry standard guidelines depending upon your sector, for example the number of hours a train driver can consecutively drive for, or be on a shift for, is closely monitored to best ensure that they are in good condition to drive.

More broadly, where safety critical work is being conducted, there is a requirement that there be a 12-hour break between one shift ending and the next one beginning.

Putting these procedures in place is one thing. Enforcing them, however, is another.

The role of technology

Technology can make the process of establishing and adhering to fatigue management protocols much easier for management teams. If your workforce can sign into and out of shifts via their mobile device, then real-time, archivable records can be kept with notifications established where infringements occur.

This enables management teams to better understand the shifts undertaken by the workforce and to take action where required.

Furthermore, by linking your fatigue management protocols to your workforce management structure, you can understand the circumstances of each worker to better combat fatigue. For example, you could link a team member’s domestic address to their shifts, better understanding their travel commitments to get to and from the location of work.

This may not sound important, but Renown Consultants were fined £450,000 by The Office of Road and Rail, with £300,000 in costs, after two of its workers were killed in a road traffic accident on the way home from a shift. Fatigue management protocols had not been adhered to and the two workers had to travel a significant enough distance home for this to prove fatal.

A holistic view

Understanding your workforce and the shift patterns of your workers is crucial to implementing an effective and robust fatigue management framework. Deploying all the information available to you and considering all the aspects will also help in implementing and maintaining your protocols.

Setting shift patterns and rosters is one thing, but then monitoring how they are conducted is another. Receiving real-time data from out in the field gives you a plethora of information.

Not only will it reveal how many hours are being worked, but it will also offer performance indicators where projects are concerned. For example, a set number of hours will be assigned to complete a given task – if this timeline is not met, understanding why is important.

Your fatigue management protocols can plug in to and interact with the rest of your processes in this way, which can help in revealing strengths and weaknesses in your processes to inform other decisions. You will also be able to identify where work is unlikely to be completed within the allocated time, in advance. All the while, you will be able to enhance the safety of your workforce.

Cutting corners with workforce safety is unacceptable and fatigue management is a central component of that. Understanding your workforce’s shift patterns and linking them to their external circumstances can play a fundamental role in ensuring that you have a robust and manageable fatigue management framework in place.

CACI is approved on the NHS England Health System Support Framework (HSSF)

Posted on: 14 July 2021

CACI has been listed to provide workforce deployment solutions for eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing software solutions by NHS England

We are delighted to announce that CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software has been listed as an approved solution on the Health Systems Support Framework (HSSF). Operated by NHS England, the HSSF is a group of associated procurement frameworks to support delivery of integrated care, digitisation of the NHS and scaling of innovation by providing a marketplace of approved providers for NHS bodies to work with.

The addition of new workforce deployment service lines focus on eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing solutions. This will help the NHS become a truly modern employer by enabling evidence-based change and utilising best practice in workforce management, deployment and development of staff. The aim is that all workforce systems purchased and used by NHS organisations will meet national data and interoperability standards.

We’re delighted that CACI has been listed as an approved supplier on this framework,” says, Ollie Watson, Business Development Director at CACI. “Our Cygnum workforce management solution meets all the service line requirements as well as offering a step change with its patient demand-based approach and resultant workforce scheduling functionality.

We’re excited to show just how much potential there is to innovate within this area.

CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software is utilised by a number of public and third sector care organisations to help optimise and automate service delivery and support excellent patient care.

eRostering is core functionality in Cygnum, with the software allowing resources to be intelligently mapped to demand. Demand can be driven by patient needs, be this task-based from a patient care plan, or based on physical occupancy such as wards and rooms.

Cygnum ensures job plans are in place by recording assessments, training and competencies effectively and considering these against patient pathway demand and organisational needs.

Cygnum also meets the requirements of temporary staffing, ensuring an efficient and controlled process from first application, recording of training and competency, to staff rostering and self-management.

For more information on Cygnum, please click here.

CACI achieves ISO 20000 accreditation

Posted on:

As part of CACI’s ongoing efforts to enhance our service delivery to our customers, we’re delighted to announce that we have achieved the ISO 20000 service management certification. Our team has worked incredibly hard to align our practices with those outlined by ITIL, and the awarding of this certification is reward for all that hard work.

The ISO 20000 certification sits alongside our ISO 9001, 14001 and 27001 certifications and demonstrates CACI’s commitment to delivering the best possible service and ongoing support to our customers. To achieve the ISO 20000 standard, we have streamlined our processes and procedures and improved the ways we manage customer service. For example, we now use dashboards to monitor customer reviews and track feedback and internal improvement against these.

I’m delighted that we have been awarded the ISO 20000 certification,” says Matt Cooper, Senior Vice President at CACI. “It provides a further layer of assurance to our customers and inspires increased confidence in our solutions. Furthermore, it highlights the robust data security controls that we have in place, demonstrating the quality of, and ongoing commitment to, our products and services and best practices that we apply as a company.

CACI becomes a member of the RSSB

Posted on:

CACI is delighted to confirm that it has been approved as a member of the RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) as it seeks to strengthen its position as a 360-degree provider of products and services to the UK’s rail industry.

RSSB’s vision of a better, safer railway for everyone is shared by CACI. Via its multitude of products and services, CACI is strongly positioned to support the entire UK rail network in delivering this vision.

CACI provides products and services across the whole rail network to help deliver improvements in infrastructure management, optimise operational resilience and enhance the overall customer experience. Our portfolio of services includes understanding passenger numbers and putting in place solutions to facilitate passengers’ safe return to rail post-Covid, to understanding and driving efficiencies across the workforce employed to operate and maintain the network. CACI also supports operators through specialist consultancy, bespoke systems development and solution migration to aid operational efficiency.

We’re delighted to welcome CACI aboard as a member of RSSB.” says Chris Leech, Membership Development Manager UK + International at RSSB. “CACI’s products and services have lots to offer our vision of a better, safer railway in the UK and we’re excited to see what difference it can make to our industry. Efficiency, safety protocols and operational insight of services have been under the spotlight in recent years, so we welcome any technology provider that can help underpin improvements in our industry.

We’re delighted to have been approved a member of RSSB,” says Matt Cooper, senior vice president at CACI. “We firmly believe that our range of products and services are a great fit for the UK’s rail network. The rail industry, like everyone else, has been impacted by Covid, so there has never been a greater need to understand customer demand for rail services. Operational insight is vital, both to understand passenger journeys and to understand the challenges faced by those working on our rail network. By driving operational insight, we firmly believe that we can support the rail industry in delivering a better, safer railway for everyone.