I’ve encountered a problem

Hi! I understand your situation very well, because we had almost the same thing – a cafe at a fitness center, 12 people, all with different modes. Personally, I was looking for a normal system for quite a long time, because Excel just couldn’t handle it – they get confused, forget, overlap, and if someone asks to replace it in two days – that’s it, it’s all chaos. We implemented https://shifton.com/shift-scheduling last fall and I still think it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made all year. Now about the schedule generator work: it doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s definitely better than I expected. The main thing is to set up the input data correctly. There you can actually set a bunch of parameters: desired working hours, number of hours per week, whether the employee has other shifts, breaks, days off, and even wishes like “don’t put me next to Vasya” (a real case, by the way). It takes all this into account, and the coolest thing is that you can make several generation options if you don’t like the first one. At first, yes, there were some oddities: for example, the system somehow assigned a person four night shifts in a row, although he had a limit of “no more than two in a row”. But this can be solved – you just fine-tune it a little more and recreate it. In two or three weeks, we completely adapted, now I just need to enter changes once a week – who is on vacation, who is sick – and update the schedule. The system itself shows conflicts if someone is overloaded or not getting enough hours, and offers solutions. Sometimes we manually correct if we need to assign someone specific, but in general, the generator does 80% of the work for us.

We only use Shifton for the warehouse, but we recently turned on the “generator schedule” too. We haven’t delved into it too much yet, but I can confirm that it saves a ton of time, especially when someone is off shift.