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Q: I have downloaded your demo and I'm interested in trying it out. Before I get too involved though, I'd like to find out if it's design will meet our needs. Basically, I'm looking for a program that will allow the sharing and rotation of two "tasks" or "shifts" daily by three people on a monthly basis. More specifically, we have a group of four people, 3 full time and 1 part time. Three of us share 2 different call positions every night, and our part time person shares our call on the weekends. I'm looking for a program that will allow us to rotate these two call positions daily between the 3 of us (on weekdays) and 4 of us (on weekends). My only other requirements are that the number of times we take each call position be split evenly among the three full time people each month, that the days we take one of the two call positions be spaced out as far apart as possible (ie. not back to back if possible), that the call positions on Friday are fixed through Sunday (ie. you keep your call position Friday through Sunday), and that the weekend call be shared monthly as evenly as possible among the four of us. If the second half (my more detailed description) doesn't make sense, I'd still be interested in whether or not your program would meet the requirements of my more general description. Thank you for your help. Look forward to your response.

A: To see if it suits it is probably best to give it a run, however I can provide some information that may assist. The Shift Scheduler applies the same parameters to each staff member across the duration of the roster. For your situation this means that you would need to manually force a NO work for your part time staff during the week (so they would not be considered) or set up two separate rosters; one for the week and one for the weekend. On the split evenly requirement the scheduler applies a random process to allocate shifts but will only allocate up to the set hours allowed so this will create a balance however it does not consider the positioning of shifts beyond attempting to meet the minimum break requirements. In other words it will not consider the 'as far away as possible' situation. Once again though you could manually force NO work situations to meet your requirements. I suggest you give it a run with some basic scenarios to get a feel and then build up from there.

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