EMS PRO GRATITUDEPRODUCT FEATURE
as soon as the schedules were printed, there were already changes to be made. The master schedule, although saved in a digital format, was frozen in time.
Another major problem was that, due to its size and complexity, our ad- ministration also feared that it could fatally crash at any moment. Our spreadsheet schedule was a monster file that ate up a substantial amount of space on our server. But there wasn’t any imme- diate alternative so we continued to put ban- dages on it and hoped for the best.
The giant, fragile system was starting to work against us.
Our administrative team decided to take a look at the scheduling and time- keeping marketplace to see what options were available. Then, we made a “wish list.”
The wish list included the ability to see real- time data, create cus- tom rotations, show greater attention to shift switches, and manage the overall security of the schedule. It was also im- portant to have a greater input from the employ- ees so direct access was a must.
For example, under our old system, employees filled out a calendar with
their availability and then a supervisor had to fill in, by hand, the blocks on the schedule. This had to be repeated for every one of the 100 employees on a monthly basis. We wanted and needed a more seamless program with less paper and less time require- ments. Our supervisors weren’t able to spend their time managing problems and employee issues because this anti- quated system required a tremendous amount of babysitting and fine- tuning. The scheduling nightmares were spilling over into other areas of our operations and caus- ing gridlock.
We were interested in online scheduling because we felt that it would provide us with the immediacy and efficiency that we were seeking. Rapid responses and real-time data were mission critical.
20 EMS PRO Magazine
The move to online scheduling was a major step in our company’s history. It required a culture shift among our managers and our EMS staff. Change can be a hard concept for employ- ees and usually requires a period of adjustment as well as a learning curve!
Many of our staff members were already using online schedul- ing programs at their other 911 fire and EMS companies so this wasn’t entirely foreign for them and we interviewed them to find out, from a user’s perspective, how the process worked for them. What did they like and dislike? What features were missing and what features couldn’t they live without? Having the employee input was a great help and gave us unique insight into how we should move forward with the online schedul- ing vendor.
Our administrative team contacted three different companies that special- ized in scheduling pro- grams. These companies were compared based on several criteria points: types of schedules, time punch options, payroll functions, and reporting features. We compared their abilities to answer our “wish list” as well as pricing, customer support, and integration with our existing payroll system.
The first company that we looked at stated that they could handle our scheduling needs and fulfill every item on our “wish list” and more, but the price quote was astronomical! It simply was not feasible. The second company could only handle part of our needs and then we would have had to piecemeal other companies into the plan to make it work. We wanted one vendor
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