Our project is to help South Australian Disability Servive(DS) get a rostering system that meet their needs. DS does not have an rostering system that can generate rosters for permanent staff automatically. And their online system to select available casual staff to fill vacancy for planned and unplanned leave can't take into account of clients needs, different awards and staff requests all together.
As the first group on Monday has got the
needs from Highgate Park centre, today we met staffs in the Business Compliance
Unit (BCU) at Oakden.
We got some information from them.
1.
Highgate primary care center is
an accommodation service belonging to Disability and Domiciliary Care Services.
They have other accommodation service centers around SA like Highgate. Each of
them is running by different team. Their functions are almost the same.
In total, there are about 15, 16 separate teams who work
independently with each other. In most cases, each team will have 50 clients
and 8-10 houses (worksites). Each team has a fixed group of staffs and they
make its own roster independently within its own staffs for its houses. Each
house has its own requirements.
The team is divided geographically and clients with the
same needs tend to be gathered together, such as clients with intellectual
disabilities are in one worksite, clients with certain level of physical
disabilities is gathered in one house.
If we can find the way to solve the rostering problems of
Highgate, the same pattern can be applied to other teams.
2. The BCU department we visited
today is working for all the different teams to give them a replacement staff
when they can’t find its own staff to take a certain shift (such as Highgate
need one more PSW who can go to Ward 3A from 7 to 15 on Tuesday, 9th
Oct.).
The replacement
staff is coming from two different sources. One is its own replacement staff
pool, which has about 150 staffs. The other is agency. They have 3 contracted
agencies they can turn to help if they need more people to work.
The replacement
staff is arranged in two different ways -- monthly and daily. Most of the roster
of each team is rearranged monthly. So once the roster of next month has been
generated, the team may know if they need extra staffs on certain days of next
month. Then they call the BCU center and book for the staffs they need. Then
some of the replacement staffs are booked monthly. Those who have not been
booked are available for daily assignment.
Each of the replacement staff has a nominated working day such as Wednesday
and Thursday. Normally, they know that they have to work on these two days but
don’t know the worksite they are going to work. For Wednesday, they may receive
calls from BCU on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning (6 AM) to inform them
their worksite for replacement of staff on sick leave or any other emergency.
Occasions that
BCU has surplus replacement staff is very rare. Mostly all of its staffs have
been assigned to certain place and they need to book staffs from agency almost every
day.
They have an independent Replacement Staff System for booking and
checking replacement staffs. It works well.
3.
After replacement has been
placed and recorded in the system mentioned above. This roster changes should
be inputted into KRONOS. In fact, KRONOS is a payroll system to generate
payment instructions which are implemented by CHRIS. So KRONOS has all the actual
roster information of different staffs from all teams as well as these
replacement staffs from BCU.
4.
As Les Rowe said today, KRONOS
cannot generate rosters. You should manually input existing rosters into it for
payroll. It can be input by day or by fixed roster pattern (like Tuesday 7 to
15 per week from 10th Oct to 10th Nov.) Any changes in real work should be
input into KRONOS or it can’t be paid correctly.
5.
Not all worksite has a swipe
card system, actually only a few teams have as it is mentioned today. The
others are working in timetable and adjustment log checking pattern. It works
well and they may don’t have budget to install swipe card system in all the
worksites. Besides, Highgate is their largest accommodation service center.
6.
They recruit people constantly
as the work force shortage. And they have training processes for new staffs.
7. I drew a picture of current
systems worked for roster. As those we interviewed today, KRONOS, CHRIS and the
replacement systems can’t be changed. We should search for a new system that
meets its requirement as generating rosters automatically.
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