Enhancing Employee Rostering Efficacy Using OptaPlanner

Posted By : Anirudh Bhardwaj | February 23, 2021

For effective business process management and planning, businesses must be able to closely monitor their workforce activities. Besides, it is critical to assign tasks as per the availability of staff, with careful consideration of other factors like their prior experience, performance, and area of specialization. Manually handling these processes can be a back-breaking task, especially when it includes complexities related to shift planning. 

 

Employee rostering systems enable project managers to schedule various shifts based on the availability of staff and their expertise. Rotating rosters has become increasingly important for restaurants, hotel chains, and manufacturing companies as they generally operate in many shifts. That said, having a robust staff rostering system in place is imperative to efficiently manage diverse business operations. 

 

Enhancing Employee Rostering Efficacy Using OptaPlanner

OptaPlanner, an AI-based constraint solver, automates employee rostering and enables project managers to efficiently manage on-site activities. This blog post highlights the benefits of OptaPlanner software development services for employee shift rostering. 

 

Also read Solving Vehicle Routing Problem Using OptaPlanner

 

What Is OptaPlanner?

OptaPlanner is an open-source, Java-based embeddable engine and AI constraint solver that facilitates effective business planning and task scheduling. It offers a lightweight embeddable engine for comprehensive business planning that streamlines complex business workflows and boosts productivity. OptaPlanner is a holistic Java-based software platform that enables developers to solve complex optimization problems and operational challenges. Besides, it’s fully compatible with popular JVM languages like Kotlin, Scala and provides AI-based constraint-solving capabilities for diverse business use cases. 

 

Some popular use cases of OptaPlanner include vehicle routing, task planning/scheduling, employee rostering, maintenance scheduling, and cloud optimization. In this post, we’ll mainly focus on the significance of OptaPlanner software development services for employee rostering. 

 

How It Works?

To address employee rostering challenges in different industries, OptaPlanner provides a dedicated platform called “OptaWeb Employee Rostering.” At its core, it is a web application that automates employee shift scheduling and rostering to yield maximum productivity. OptaWeb provides an all-inclusive source code for scheduling nurses for medical staff rostering. Nevertheless, you can optimize the source code and fork it to develop a high-performance rostering software that fulfills your business requirements. For instance, businesses can use OptaPlanner software development services to create rosters for manufacturing units, factory workers, security personnel shift scheduling, and so on. 

 

The OptaWeb Domain Model For Employee Rostering

Given below is a flow diagram that clearly represents the OptaWeb software architecture for employee rostering and how it works. It will help you understand the behavior of different class objects and how they function together to achieve the desired results. 

OptaPlanner software development services
Source: OptaPlanner

In the above class diagram, blocks represent different types of Java entities that the database holds for employee rostering. Whereas, the arrows represent the mapping of different entities to perform appropriate actions. During the process, changing one entity may impact the functionality of the entire application. 

 

The first Java object stores the name of the skill as well as the client ID. Similarly, the other Java objects store employee information, task details, and shift timings. Based on the given inputs, OptaWeb automatically creates employee rosters and performs task planning and shift scheduling. 

 

You may also be interested in reading How Manufacturing Companies Can Benefit From Custom ERP

 

The Bottom Line

Apart from employee rostering, OptaPlanner renders support for several other business use cases including task scheduling, vehicle routing, conference scheduling, maintenance scheduling, and task assignment optimization. Above all, the platform is open-source and does not require any license purchases, and is fairly easy to use and implement. The holistic Java environment makes it easy for developers to learn and use it to develop high-quality business applications. However, choosing the right team of developers or technology partners is imperative to achieve the desired productivity. 

 

We, at Oodles ERP, provide enterprise-grade OptaPlanner software development services to solve complex business problems for diverse business use cases. Our development team is skilled at using OptaPlanner’s optimization heuristics and metaheuristics to automate diverse business processes with minimal coding intricacies. Our end-to-end OptaPlanner development and integration services focus on streamlining mission-critical business tasks with sheer accuracy and efficacy. For more information, reach out to us at [email protected].

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