Roster Plans exist for one reason: to power the Smart Roster feature, which auto-fills your weekly rosters based on a template you've built.
Not using Smart Roster? You don't need to set up a Roster Plan. Roster Plans only affect the Smart Roster feature. To build rosters manually, see Creating Rosters or Copying Rosters.
A Roster Plan is a reusable template that defines:
The shifts that make up a typical week for a team
The Work Groups required for each shift
Any preferred people for specific shifts
When you load a Smart Roster, Droppah uses the plan as the starting point and fills in the rest of your staff based on availability, max hours, and your rostering settings.
In this article
When to use Smart Roster
Smart Roster works best when your week looks pretty similar most of the time. If you've got a handful of shifts that always go to specific people (your Sunday brunch chef, your Friday close bartender) and the rest of the roster is happy to be filled by whoever's available and within their hours, Smart Roster will do the heavy lifting for you.
It's less useful if:
Your roster changes significantly from week to week with no repeating pattern
Every shift needs to go to a specific person (in which case, Copying Rosters from last week may be faster)
How it Works
Smart Roster is a two-step flow:
Build a Roster Plan once for each team, defining the shifts in a typical week and any preferred people.
Load a Smart Roster each week from that plan, and Droppah fills in the rest.
You'll spend a bit of time up front building the plan, but once it's set, weekly rostering becomes a few clicks.
Creating a Roster Plan
The Roster Plans tab in the sidebar is where you create and manage your plans. You might have plans that differ depending on the season, or to manage one-off events. Alternatively, if your week is fairly regular, you may just have a single plan.
To make a new Roster Plan, go to the Roster Plans tab and click New Plan. Add a name for your plan, then select the Team it should be available to. If your company has multiple Teams you can choose whether the roster plan is only for a certain team, or if it should be available to all teams.
Click + Shifts on Day 1 to add any shifts that apply for that day. The day of the week that the roster should start on can be adjusted below the day number.
Then add the required Work Groups for each shift.
You can change the number of staff members required for each Work Group in a shift by using the + and - buttons, or you can click on a Work Group within a shift to edit how many people are required and add your preferred people for that Work Group/shift.
If you don't add any Work Groups to a shift, the shift will be blank when you load the Roster Plan. You can then add Work Groups and people as required.
You can add additional days to your plan by clicking + New day and selecting either New Day to create a new day from scratch, or Copy Day to copy one of the days you've already setup in the plan.
Once you're happy with your plan, click Save.
Loading a Smart Roster
Once your Roster Plan is built, you can load it into a roster at any time.
Click the + button on the day you want the roster to start, then select Smart Roster.
A popup will appear with the settings for your roster:
Team — If you already had a Team selected from the drop-down at the top of the screen, it'll be pre-selected here. If you had All Teams selected, pick the team you want to roster.
Plan — Choose the Roster Plan that should form the basis of the roster.
Start — The date the roster starts from. This defaults to the date you clicked the + on, and the End date is set automatically as the last day of your chosen plan.
Once you're happy with the settings, click the purple Roster button.
How Droppah fills the Roster
When loading a Smart Roster, Droppah first applies a set of hard constraints that must be met:
People can't be rostered if they aren't available (due to Time Off or their Weekly Availability set on their record)
Only one person can be assigned to a given roster entry
A single person can't work overlapping shifts
Once those are locked in, Droppah works through your preferences in priority order:
Highest priority: preferred people set in your Roster Plan, maximum hours per week on employee records, and filling the roster as much as possible
High priority: the Optimisation Category set in your Rostering Settings
Medium priority: evenly distributing shifts across the team
Low priority: maximum stint durations and minimum stint gap tolerances (both set in your Rostering Settings)
Droppah will always prioritise filling every shift, even if that means the roster doesn't meet some of your preferred settings.
Reviewing the Result
Once your plan has loaded, Droppah will show a summary of the roster that's been generated. If some shifts or employees couldn't meet all your preferred settings, warnings will flag what's worth a look. See Roster Warnings for details.
Click Finish to proceed. Your roster will be generated with employees automatically assigned to each Work Group in each shift.
Adjusting your Roster
You can tweak any part of the prefilled roster as needed. See Loading Rosters for editing in the calendar view, or head to the Resources View for a drag-and-drop approach.
For a look at any shifts that couldn't be filled, see the Reviewing Unfilled Shifts section in Loading Rosters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why hasn't my preferred person been rostered for their shift?
Why hasn't my preferred person been rostered for their shift?
The most common reasons Droppah hasn't rostered a preferred person from your Roster Plan onto their usual shift:
Rostering them for that shift would substantially exceed their maximum preferred hours per week (inclusive of breaks), set on their employee record
Adding them to the shift would have prevented filling the rest of the roster
Adding them to the shift would have violated several lower-priority constraints (see "How Droppah fills the roster" above) that together outweigh the benefit of rostering them on
See Roster Warnings for more on the specific warnings you may see.