Interview with SA Disability Service staffs

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, 9^th 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.