Scheduling Archives

Scheduling – getting the most from workforce management in the transport industry

Posted on: 6 March 2024

Having the right people in the right place at the right time sounds easy. In largescale transport organisation, effective scheduling is crucial

At the heart of workforce management sits the simple sounding task of scheduling. Your organisation has shifts to fulfil and a pool of workers to fulfil them. Add staff to the rota and away you go. Such shift patterns can be sacrosanct across organisations of any size, providing clarity to workers, management and administrators alike. In largescale transport organisations, however, there are several moving parts to consider and shift patterns can be thrown off course by anything from weather to equipment failure and cancellations in the supply chain.

This blog aims to take a closer look at scheduling in transport organisations. It’s a topic we’ve covered in greater detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. If you would like to explore the topic in greater detail, you can download a free copy here.

There are myriad tasks that need completing across the transport industry. The complication introduced to the scheduling process often requires a lot of manual work by administrators and schedulers. People fall ill, take holidays and external events can throw a schedule completely off kilter.

Automation in workforce management

Automation of scheduling can greatly reduce the administrative burden. At its most prosaic, automation can simply assign workers to shifts in advance. This can be set out indefinitely, with new workers swapped in for departing/unavailable members of staff easily. Such a process can consider your bespoke business rules and any other factors such as the working time directive and fatigue management.

Where automation can lend a vital hand is in times of strain. We’ve seen examples, notably during the Covid pandemic, of vast swathes of a workforce being absent at once. Where a manual process exists, this resulted in inevitable cancellations of services. With carefully configured automation, it is possible to be more agile in the face of disruption.

Where a worker is absent, having a central system and a central view of your entire workforce enables swift consideration of replacements. This works for smaller examples, too. For example, if a train is delayed and members of crew onboard it are required to meet another service which they will now miss, how can this be handled?

An automated process enables identification of other members of staff who are nearby and can be reassigned, whilst at the same time handling all communications with staff members. The staff who have been delayed can then be reassigned to other tasks, ensuring that their shift isn’t wasted.

Variable demand and moving parts

Another factor to consider in the transport industry is variable demand and moving parts. A high level example of this is the change in train timetables during the Christmas period. Fewer customers means less demand for services, therefore, services can be reduced to ensure more efficient use of the network and staff time.

A more short-term example of this is in shipping. Where a port is expecting a shipment, staff need to be prepared to meet it to initiate the unloading and loading of it. Variation is frequent in such a scenario, since ships can be diverted at a moment’s notice to other ports due to factors such as storms. Another example would be the blockage of the Suez Canal. This can leave a port with a full roster of staff without a function to fulfil. This is a waste of time, money and staffing resources.

Mapping out the changes caused by variable demand in a central system can help to understand its implications. Factors such as cost can be calculated and your response to it can be better informed. Understanding where the risks of variable demand are most likely to occur can help mitigate its impact.

Another example is with revenue protection officers on trains. Understanding the demand for services helps to better utilise them. There’s little point, for example, scheduling ticket inspectors during rush hour to major stations, since moving through the train is all but impossible. Similarly, there are more likely to be barriers at major stations, so working out the best deployment of such staff is more likely to realise the ultimate aim of their work.

Overlaying tasks onto shifts

Establishing a schedule is one thing. Rosters can be worked out well in advance and communicated to staff. But what happens when they show up on the day? Often the set number of employees turn up and discover the specifics of their tasks at that point.

Utilising a workforce management system such as Cygnum helps organisations to understand the specifics of the tasks that need be fulfilled during a shift. This helps organisations to better prepare aspects such as equipment required, time needed to complete the task and where exactly they need to be.

This helps to drive better understanding and efficiency through shifts and tasks. Matching specific skills and experiences to not only shifts, but also tasks, better ensures that the right people are performing the right tasks.

Conclusion

Scheduling can be a complicated and nuanced process, especially across largescale organisations. With several moving parts, variable demand, unpredictable disruptions and the usual ebb and flow of workforce absences, managing the process can be extremely complicated. This can result in inefficiency and poor service delivery.

Introducing automation, clear communication and overlaying tasks onto shifts helps to better understand your workforce the tasks required of them and more accurately assign staff to tasks based on their skills, experience, training, availability and geographic location.

This is a topic that we’ve explored in greater detail in our recent white paper, which you can download freely here. Alternatively, if you would like more information on how Cygnum can help you with your workforce management requirements, please visit our website.

Effective workforce management – training and competency management

Posted on: 17 April 2023

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Whilst training and competency management are closely linked, there are some differences.

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

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.

The importance of communication in rail safety

Posted on: 24 February 2023

A collision between a train and tractor in Kisby highlights the importance of training, briefing and communicating with all workers and operators to enhance rail safety.

Setting out safety guidelines and effectively communicating them with the workforce is paramount to creating a safe and accountable working environment. If staff aren’t briefed on safety procedures and processes whilst conducting their work, then mistakes are likely to happen. This was brought into focus on 19 August 2021 when a freight train collided with agricultural machinery being towed by a tractor at 04:10. The incident happened at Kisby, at a user worked crossing. The train was travelling at 66mph. So, how did this happen?

According to the report released in October 2022 by RAIB (Rail Accident Investigation Branch), the accident occurred because the driver of the tractor didn’t telephone the signal operator to check that it was okay to cross. Rather, they assumed that it was safe to look at the tracks to determine whether or not a train was approaching. With the train travelling at such speed, they didn’t see it, resulting in the collision.

Firstly, the incident could have been significantly worse. The train driver sustained minor injuries in the collision, with the driver of the tractor uninjured. From a collateral perspective, the locomotive and one wagon derailed, whilst the rail infrastructure sustained significant damage.

The cost of repairing the infrastructure, whilst not noted in the RAIB report, will have been significant, whilst there’s also the time the section of rail will have been out of action for to take into consideration. The stretch of line of was out of action for four days whilst the train was recovered and the tracks were repaired. This will have resulted in delayed and cancelled services.

A Class 66 locomotive, the type of locomotive involved in the accident here, has a value of around £1.5m. This is based on GBRf spending £50m on a fleet of 37 such locomotives in 2014. It’s fair to assume the repair bill won’t have been cheap.

The short-term planning, to assign engineers at short notice to track repairs, will have taken them away from other projects on the rail, resulting in other projects being affected by this incident. This, too, will have had cost implications, as well as creating scheduling issues for engineering workers, since their rosters will have had to be re-jigged.

It’s clear that the cost, time and resource implications of this incident were vast. That’s before taking into consideration just how much worse the incident could have been.

In its report, RAIB notes that the driver of the tractor wasn’t aware of the requirement to phone the signal operator to check it was safe to cross. They had not been briefed. RAIB concludes that this is most likely a result of the land owner on either side of the crossing failing to brief users of the crossing in a way which resulted in its correct use. Rail staff were unaware of this until shortly before the incident.

So, significant upheaval, in terms of time and cost, was created because of a simple lack of communication and safety briefings. How can such a situation be avoided?

Having the ability to evidence that training has been delivered, briefings have been given and that communication is recorded, is a major step in the right direction. The RAIB report notes that they were unable to find evidence of any call from the tractor driver to the signal operator, nor that the tractor driver had been briefed on the need to do so. Creating an evidence trail of such activities enables organisations to determine where failings have occurred and rectify them, preferably before an accident happens.

The technology exists to underpin such processes. Keeping a robust record of training and briefings can help to ensure that incidents such as this are avoided. And they are a lot cheaper than repairing a Class 66 locomotive.

Complete workforce management solutions can support your training, competency management, recruitment and scheduling. This helps organisations to keep a complete audit trail of activities, ensuring that tasks, such as safety briefings, are conducted. Human error, however, is inevitable, so they can also assist in the short-term rescheduling of staff to emergency activities such as track repair in the wake of such incidents.

Operating the UK’s rail infrastructure is a complex process which requires the monitoring of several moving and independent parts, as this incident highlights. It involves everyone from land owners to rail operators and anyone who needs to cross the tracks. Keeping tabs on the communication with all parties is difficult. Having a system in place to record communications and aspects such as safety briefing enables operators to keep track of who needs to know what and when.

The cost of not having such a system in place can run beyond the financial. The incident at Kisby could easily have been a fatal one. Is it acceptable that such an avoidable incident occurred through simple ignorance of the required process for safely crossing a railway track? The process can be managed and alerts can be created to ensure that everyone receives the briefings they need to receive. The cost of not doing this can be far greater than the cost of implementing the software that helps to avoid such incidents.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum

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 – 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.

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.