Planning module

Workforce planning is becoming increasingly important for businesses. Companies want to be able to deploy materials and employees effectively. Unfortunately, recruiting staff and temporary workers is getting harder every year. This increases uncertainty about having enough staff and makes creating a good schedule more difficult.

Just like time registration, planning in HortiTime is built around your company’s activities. Every company can add its own activities to HortiTime and simply drag them onto the planning board. The next step is assigning staff. HortiTime shows the list of users who are actually present that day. Permanent employees are shown or hidden based on their contracts and leave. On-call workers can enter their availability and be scheduled accordingly. No more searching through messages or emails to find out who is available when.

Planning long-running activities, such as planting, potting or moving plants in and out, is especially important. That’s why we’ve made it easy to repeat planning cards. Cards can be repeated daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. When repeating, the system checks staff availability and only includes employees on days they are actually available. This lets you quickly and easily schedule large jobs across multiple days and see in advance whether there will be enough manpower for the work. If the schedule doesn’t work out due to weather, rush orders or other circumstances, you can easily move a single planning card or an entire series.

Employees can view the schedule on their mobile phone, or see the current day’s schedule on a screen in the canteen. Scheduling staff also helps with time registration, since the same information is already filled in beforehand. Staff only need to enter the hours worked per activity, which further reduces the chance of errors. This is especially helpful when also registering the resources and materials used.