About Shift Plan Templates

Shift plan templates are used to automatically generate crew shifts based on a set of pre-defined shift criteria such as the shift type, the shift rotation, the defined calendar, and so on.

Templates can be created as basic common templates for multiple crews, basic templates for a specific crew or templates that crews are subscribed to:

  • Common templates: Common templates establish an initial date for rotations to start, number of weeks for rotation, work calendar and the type of schedule plan. These templates do not specify details such as the specific crew. Since they do not specify the crew, common templates cannot be directly used to generate shifts. Shifts are actually generated from the subscription template that references the common template. If a common template is changed after shifts have been generated, the changes are not reflected until the next time batch processing runs. You can apply changes to the specific crew shift manually.

    The initial rotation date ensures that all generated shifts for crews subscribing to the template are at the same rotation position regardless of when the crew subscribed to the template. Rotation is calculated based on the common initial rotation date and not the subscription effective date.

    For example, if a common template has a 2 week rotation where on the first week the crew works on Monday but on the second week the crew works on Tuesday. If one crew subscribes to this template just prior to the first week and another subscribes just toward the end of the first week, then for the first crew the first generated shifts is a Monday whereas the second crew’s first generated shift is a Tuesday.

  • Subscription templates: Subscription templates are used to subscribe a particular crew to a common shift plan template. They define an effective period to which shifts for the crew can be generated based on the details on the common template.
  • Crew templates: Crew templates establish an effective and expiration date, a number of rotation weeks, work calendar and the shift plan type for a specific crew.

Daily vs. Weekly Templates

The shift plan type defined on common templates and crew templates, designate whether the template is for daily or weekly shifts. The type also defines the details for those shifts such as the daily start and end times for daily shifts, or the schedule period for weekly shifts. Weekly crew shifts represent a set of daily shifts, typically with one crew shift template per day of the week. A weekly template can map crew templates for rotating cycles of one or many weeks. This is used to account for shift variations across multiple week cycles.