Prepopulate 64% of Your Shift Records on Gather

Hi, it's Will from Gather. Today I'm going to plan a week of shifts in less than 10 minutes.  Ideally five minutes.

0:16

Prepare the right information

Before we start, let's have a quick look and make sure we've got our data sources. We've got all the shift information, labour plan and all our activities. It's good to go. We'll start the timer now.

Timer startsLet's go into shift planner. I'm going to plan a week of work.

Let's say we'll do from Saturday night. I will start at nine o'clock. That's going to be a nine-hour shift. Really simple. We'll make it for Emilia. I'm going to have non-possession. We'll do that because it's elevant to other sectors, not just rail.

I'll copy it down. Maybe Emilia has got five shifts this week. We're doing it for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday. She's doing nights. Let's just say we're gonna do eight hours midweek, nine hours on the weekend. Maybe she's working at different locations. At one station for two nights, and then we'll say, We'll finish at another station.

Great. We've got all that information there. We can change these shifts if you want. But let's move on and plan for Emilia's team.

Input shift details

Let's go into the detail then. We can put in access information, labour, plant, materials, fatigue assessments, if applicable, and any tax. I would normally start at the labour section.

If we click into labour, we've got our supplier. Let's go from this demo company. I want Banksman. I want Dean Goldcross, I can check on Dean and put his travel time in. 15 minutes. We can check if Dean to get an exceedance straight away. That's good, with no exceedances. I will just scroll back.

We'll start to add a few more people in from our demo company. Obviously Emilia, who's the construction manager. Then we maybe want someone else. Let's say an engineer. Let's choose people that are available, Jamie. Tom's look available there. Let's put Beth in, which is great.

Automatic fatigue calculator

We can put their different start times in. Maybe Amelia starts a little bit earlier, because she's the supervisor. We'll put their travel times in. It could be different for each team member. Okay, no exceedance! It's great.

Let's check what that means. We check for those key parameters around fatigue score. I was worked. There's no risk putting these people on a night shift 45. They're way off that. Great.

Add materialsNow we've got those four shifts. What I like to do then is to build out that first shift. We've got some plant from here. We've got another NRV. Got two of those. They are starting at 10.Maybe we want trailer that goes with it. We can pull whatever we need to put in materials. They're all inside already. That's good.

3:38

Fill out activities

Then we'll put some worklogs. So what we're going to do is working at location A326. We're going to do some civils. We're going to C143 trough installation. The unit of measurement has already pulled through. We're planning to do 50 meters in the shift.

Maybe we're also working at location B3 for civils. Then we can save C119, the biggest we'll do 25 years.

I'll just then change the activity. We'll start the activity at one o'clock. You will see the date automatically updates. Then we maybe wanted to start that activity or finish activity at three. And this shift starts a little bit earlier. I think we could do that by two, probably split the team. Okay, you get the idea.

Duplicate and refineWe can go on plan those individual shifts. Maybe we're doing very similar work with Emilia's team all week. So we'll just add the labour from the first shift. We'll do that. Then we'll check any fatigue exceedances, which I can have a look at in a second.

And then we can also do the same for plant and then worklog. You can always go back and amend these afterwards. No big difference.

Let's have a look what's gone wrong here. So, we'll check the exceedances again. Just scroll across. We can see them. There's an issue here with Amelia. The fatigue score is quite high on that shift.

I'd imagine it's because she's now doing a significantly longer shift. We don't want Emilia to be starting earlier. We can go and change that. She should be starting at nine o'clock like everyone else.

Now we will see that there's no issue. Let's just go and fix that other issue, assuming it's the same thing. Move Emilia to nine o'clock as well.

Okay, we've got some few other exceedances. Let's check. Everyone's got quite high fatigue scores here, because we worked all these nights. Right, we're going to put everyone in hotels. We're going to reduce the travel time massively.

Hopefully, we have to reduce the shift duration Let's check. Okay, that worked. We'll put everyone in hotels. We'll add that in a second. We change their travel time accordingly. Great stuff.

6:08

Easy double check

Okay, we'll just recheck the shifts. We've got that. Maybe we can want to make change in the worklog. Actually, we're not actually working at location today. We're working at C and D. You can put all the detail you want. Just choose from your drop downs.

Checking again. If you want to put access information, you can do some math. We've got access edit. I'll edit for everything. We can put in all this information for one or just when the works commense. Let's plan to start at 10 o'clock everyday.

For full duplication we can just copy it. We're set slightly different working pattern for each shift. So these are all going to start at 23:00. You can see the date updates here. They're all going to still finish at five. And five again.

07:10

We can put more information if you want. We can put things in like the ELR, the LOR, and all that kind of good stuff. It's entirely up to you. The system saves all that information. We will go back and check again every time we refresh the interface. We check the labels. We can tag them if you want to. Or we can just leave it as it is.

Leave room for flexibilityWe have now planned some very basic shifts. I can then plan them all. But maybe I'm not so sure about the last two shifts. So I'll leave them like that in this planning process. This is perhaps Emilia wants to see how the first three shifts pan out.

Plan the shifts. There's no exceedance. No fatigue notifications here. There's nothing wrong.  Then we check again. There's no other shifts being created. No issues with the fatigue.

Automatic notifications

As soon as we upload these shifts, Emilia will get an email notification. I'll just filter for some shift here for Emilia. As you can see, she's got those awaiting actuals for that week. They will be available on our mobile device, ready for her to complete.

If we go into a typical record, we can see shift information is partially complete inside. In the weather access, we've got the work commence and what's complete with the planned element.

We put the actuals in, all the resources there as we planned. Then we just need to put in the actuals for the activities as well.

Hope that helps. Let us how you get on with the shift planner. Thank you.

‍