Shift Generation

The system generates future shifts for crews based on the shift plan templates with which they are associated.

Common templates do not generate shifts as they are not defined for specific crews. Only a crew specific plan template and a crew's subscription to a common template are used to generate shifts for the crew throughout their effective period. Unlike a crew specific shift plan template that is self contained, a crew's subscription to a common template sets the shift generation effective period, whereas template details as well as the initial rotation date are defined on the common template.

Shifts are generated based on the cyclical pattern of the shift plan template, starting from the shift plan template's effective date (or from now if the effective date is in the past) and up to a predefined number of days known as the planning horizon, or earlier, if the template expires before then.

The planning horizon is defined as a Global Configuration Setup parameter and is used by the shift generation process to control the maximum number of days for shifts to generate and be available for planning purposes at any point in time.

If the template references a work calendar, the process skips generating shifts that even partially overlap with a public holiday.

The first few shifts may be initially generated online when you apply a crew specific shift template or verify the setup for a crew's subscription to a common template, but the ongoing process of generating additional shifts to meet the planning horizon is handled by the shift plan template monitor process.

Note: The shift generation process relies on the shift plan template being periodically monitored by the Shift Weekly Template Periodic Monitor batch process as often as appropriate to meet your organization's needs.

The background process is designed to add new shifts as needed on a daily basis. However, if any shift template was changed, the process would automatically regenerate future shifts that were earlier generated by that template to match its latest version. By default, even shifts that were manually overridden are regenerated to match the latest template version, but you may explicitly indicate to retain these changes when making a shift template change.

Refer to Overridden Shift Details for more information.

When a shift is about to be generated but happens to overlap with another shift for the crew that was not generated by this template, the generation of the shift is skipped and a user is notified by raising a to do entry that reports the situation.

Note: Logic used to generate shifts from a shift template resides in a "Generate Shifts" algorithm on the shift template's business object.