Planners need to account for a whole range of different factors when setting up a staff schedule – for example, local agreements and employee contracts as well as budgets, individual employee qualifications and employee availability, as well as Client SLA’s.
Too many staff will result in extra costs, too few will compromise customer service. Setting up a schedule is therefore essentially a combination problem, but the number of possible combinations is typically far too large to be handled in a simple spreadsheet; it requires a system with considerable power and mathematical sophistication.