Preference rules

WHAT ARE PREFERENCE RULES

Preference Rules are an important part of automatic scheduling. They allow you to set your schedule based on employees' preference, pay rate, rank in general or rank in a certain category (area, task, department, etc..), or on how many hours they have worked so far. Preference rules give managers a lot of scheduling flexibility, and allow them to make automatic scheduling optimized to fit the company's specific policies.

Based on your particular preference rules, the system grades each employee for each time block of your schedule, by performing a calculation which determines that employee's suitability for that particular time block. To understand how does WSDN generate the grades, refer to Grades topic.

HOW THE SYSTEM USES YOUR PREFERENCE RULES

When you have only one preference rule, it's easy for the system to determine which employee is the best match for an open time block because there is only one rule to go by.
For example, if you only have set the rule "Schedule employee who have the lowest pay rate", then the system will always look at the lowest paid employee and gives him/her the priority in scheduling.

When you have two or more preference rules, the factor of importance for each preference rule gives higher or lower importance to that particular rule in the overall system. The factor of importance is a parameter, which determines how important this rule is with respect to all other preference rules that may exist in the list of rules. The more preference rules that you setup, the more complicated the calculations become.

For example, if you set the preference rule "Schedule employee with the highest rank first" with a factor of 10, and "Schedule employee who have the lowest pay rate" with a factor of 1, the system knows that it should schedule highest ranked employees first. In the case of a tie between two employees, the system evaluates the employees based on the second rule, which basically serves as a tie breaker, and assigns the time block to the employee with the lower pay rate.

PREFERENCE RULES LIST

•	Employee preference rule: when you add this rule, employees who declared that they would prefer to work would be considered for scheduling first. Employees declare their preference in the My Availability screen.

These rules allow you to try to even out the number of working hours for all employees:

•	Least hours so far rule: when you add this rule, the system looks at all employees' scheduled time so far, and gives priority of scheduling for the employee who has least number of hours.

•	Least hours so far by category: when you add this rule, the system looks at all employees' scheduled time so far, and gives priority of scheduling for the employee who has least number of hours in a certain department/area/task or any other category.

•	Employee rank (highest): when you add this rule, employees who have highest rank will be considered for scheduling first.

•	Employee rank (lowest): when you add this rule, employees who have lowest rank will be considered for scheduling first.

•	Employee rank by category: when you add this rule, employees who have the highest rank in a certain department/area/task or any other category, will be considered for scheduling first.

•	Employees by lowest pay rate: when you add this rule, the lowest paid employee will be considered for scheduling first. You set the pay Hourly Rate for every employee in his/her User's Account.

•	Employees by lowest pay rate for the category: when you add this rule,the lowest paid employee in a certain department/area/task or any other category, will be considered for scheduling first.