Common Plan Templates
You can set up common plan templates which can be shared across multiple crews. This is helpful for the efficient generation of shifts in organizations where there are sometimes hundreds or possibly even thousands of crews that follow the same weekly shift patterns.
This section describes concepts related to setting up and maintaining common plan templates.
Subscription
The common plan template defines the initial date of the cyclical weekly pattern as well as the details for each shift template. These shift templates cannot include crew specific information, such as the resources allocated to the crew on that shift and so on, as they need to be shared by multiple crews.
You may subscribe multiple crews to a common plan template to use as their template for generating shifts. Shifts generated from the common plan template are exactly the same except for crew specific details which are defaulted from the crew record. Any crew that subscribes to a common template must have these types of details defined on the crew record.
Subscription to a common template is effective dated so that crews can subscribe to follow a common template as of a given date and this relationship can expire. Each crew can subscribe at different times, but their shifts are generated in the same rotation timing as all other subscribed resources, regardless of when they subscribed.
You may also unsubscribe a crew from the common template at any time or change effective dates to affect the creation of future shifts for those crews.
Activation
In a typical workflow, you would create a common plan template and then subscribe multiple crews to the template. When template and subscriptions are ready to be used to generate shifts, you activate the template. Shifts are generated only when the common template is active.
Since a common template may involve a large number of subscriptions, actual shift generation is performed the next time the shift generation batch process runs. Note that you may still test your template and process it online for a subscribed crew without waiting for the next scheduled batch run.
Refer to Shift Generation for more information.
Making Changes To An Active Template
Changes made to an already active common plan template affect future shifts of all subscribed crews. Since a common plan template may involve a large number of subscriptions, such changes are not applied right away to all these shifts but rather they take effect the next time the shift generation batch process runs. This includes extending or shortening the effective period of an active template, subscribing or unsubscribing a crew, and so on.
If you want to test your recent changes without waiting for the next scheduled batch run you can do so by processing them online for one of the subscribed crews.
Similar to crew specific shift templates, if you attempt to add, delete, or modify a shift template for a shift plan template, the system automatically creates a draft copy of the entire shift plan template, leaving the original template unchanged.
This allows you to make changes in a more controlled way. You make changes to the draft copy and preview the shifts that would be generated should you accept the draft. If you decide to accept the draft, the original template is updated to match the draft. However, unlike crew specific templates, the impact on these changes on future shifts only takes effect the next time the shift generation batch process runs.
Refer to Draft and Original Templates for more information.