Web-based Scheduling Solutions
April 21, 2004 10:35 AM   Subscribe

Any suggestions for a web-based employee scheduling solution that allows people to submit vacation requests and personal preferences? (more inside)

I'm unfortunately in charge of scheduling 70 emergency physicians at 3 different sites. Currently everyone submits their personal preferences by paper (vacation time, needed days off, recurrent weekly meetings, etc), and then I manually enter these requests into a program that is supposed to generate a schedule. Our needs have proven too complicated for this program (it's a commercially available $10,000 piece of software called Tangier) so I end up doing all the scheduling by hand. Which sucks.

My hope is that I could at least find or develop some way for people to enter their requests to some web based system that will automatically keep track of how many people are going to be away at a conference or on a particular holiday so we aren't faced with the problem of everyone being gone at once... which happens occasionally because it's incredibly cumbersome to make sense of all the information. Frequently, I dont know until the schedule is almost complete whether we're going to have gaps... then I have to call people based on their seniority in the department and tell them they cant go on the trip to which they've already purchased tickets, for instance. It seems more equitable to make this determination based on when they submit their requests.

Anyway, lots of information. Any help would be appreciated.
posted by mert to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
I was about to say something along the lines of "that sounds like a simple-enough web application" until I read the part about your needs being too complicated for a $10K piece of software dedicated to physician scheduling. I have absolutely no experience with scheduling software, but I'm intrigued now -- what is so complicated with your setup that Tangier can't handle it? My first suggestion would be to get in touch with Tangier technical support.

Short of that, you need to find some scheduling software that is flexible enough to fill your needs (Googling "employee scheduling software" turns up many results, but I'm guessing you already knew that), or hire someone to code a custom application for you. How much are you or your employer willing to spend on finding a solution to this?

(On a completely unrelated note, I thought I might take this opportunity to mention that I am an impoverished university student with commercial experience in building data-centric user-friendly web applications, who happens to have a penchant for logic problems, and has nothing much planned during June and July. Ahem.)
posted by chrismear at 12:42 PM on April 21, 2004


I'm sure the different sites have a lot to do with it, or Tangier's ability to compute schedules based on seniority or something like that.

Because it looks pretty damn complicated, with web based access already.
posted by geoff. at 1:36 PM on April 21, 2004


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