About Flexible Shifts and Time Edits

Flexible times facilitate the ability to change and suppress scheduled hours known as Shift Assignments in the application. Using flexible times simplifies the staffing steps for unassigned, scheduled, or unscheduled groups of employees, and allows users to quickly nudge their shift assignment hours forward or back, drag and staff people to a position with varying times, or switch people to positions outside scheduled hours in a single transaction. Additionally, when Fill By Rules or Auto-Assign are configured to return and staff on-duty personnel the Flexible Times feature can automatically suppress unallocated scheduled hours.

A shift assignment derives from the person’s assignment tab and tells the system when and where, and whether to place the person on the Roster for the day. The person’s shift assignment is visible on the Roster along with a Regular Duty or Working type work code. This feature optionally includes the ability to automatically suppress unallocated shift assignment hours, or suppress the shift assignment vacancy, or do both.

For example:

Suppose a person’s shift assignment starts at 7AM and ends at 4PM, using Edit and flexible times, this person can move their start time to 9AM and end their shift at 6PM. The initial behavior of the shift assignment time frame, specifically from 7AM - 9AM depends on the flexible times configuration; for example, if...

Suppress Assignment is checked, then the person’s initial assignment is suppressed from 7AM - 9AM. The new assignment starts at 9AM and ends at 6PM.

Suppress Assignment is not checked, means do not suppress the shift assignment, this means 7AM to 9AM is not suppressed.

Suppress Vacancy is checked, and the person assigned to work the position calls in Sick after they modified their assignment hours. The Sick code will apply to the most recent assignment time frame, meaning 9AM to 6PM and no vacancy will show.

Suppress Vacancy is not checked, using the previous Sick code scenario, the sick code will apply to the most recent assignment time frame, meaning 9AM to 6PM and the vacancy shown on the Roster will be the initial shift assignment of 7AM to 4PM.

The default behavior to suppress the shift assignment is controlled by the work code in Setup > Code. This allows organizations to control the behavior at the work code level, so you can allow some codes to offer Flexible Times and others that don’t. Moreover, the work code in the List Target in Setup > Rules controls whether the work code selected within will suppress the shift assignment and shift assignment vacancy using the Fill By Rules... screen.

The Add, Edit, Switch, and Fill By Rules windows support Flexible Times functionality.

Also see related topics: About Flexing Time, and About Suppressed Assignments