Originally posted on https://www.noobpreneur.com/2019/04/25/the-team-test-why-scheduling-is-vital-for-large-businesses/

For a large business to be successful it must run efficiently. This can be difficult when a business is made up of a number of different employees, departments, disciplines and locations. While a large business is made up of many differing components, the most successful businesses have mastered the ability to bring all the components together into one streamlined, holistic and efficient entity.

Scheduling is essential in making a business with many disparate elements run as one well-oiled machine. In the past, this process was met with considerable difficulties by business owners attempting to manually organise cross-department schedules. Fortunately, Deputy rostering software has now made this process simple, with a cost-efficient scheduling solution for any large business.

A well-prepared schedule ensures that resources, employees and projects are organised and allocated in the most cost-effective and timely manner across the organisation. Read on to further explore the reasons why scheduling is important for large businesses.

Reduce Costs

Various considerable expenses are incurred by businesses every day as a result of inefficient scheduling. We explore the most common and costly expenses incurred by large businesses that could easily be avoided by appropriate scheduling practices.

1. Over-Scheduling Employees

If your business has casual or part-time employees, it is important to ensure that your work rosters are modified to reflect particularly busy or slow periods. Rostering three people to work on a day that only requires one team member, is a considerable waste of money.

One of the major benefits of utilising rostering software is that it is capable of automatically optimising staffing levels by using your live sales data. Automated rosters modify the number of staff that is rostered on during particularly busy or quiet time periods or days. The software therefore ensures that a sufficient amount of employees are scheduled to complete the work efficiently, without breaking the budget.

2. Overtime and Time Theft

It can be difficult to track the movements of all employees of a large business. However, failing to monitor when your employees start, take their breaks and finish their work day, can lead to considerable expenses incurred by your business.

Rostering software utilises on-site time clocks to ensure that your employees have arrived and finished work at their approved time. This protects you from the payment of unapproved overtime and time theft from dishonest employees. Leading scheduling software provides employees with the capability to clock in and out directly from their smartphone, making the process simple and easy.

3. Project Management

Large businesses often have a number of operations and projects occurring at the same time across different departments. Many of these operations will intersect and be mutually reliant on the other for the business’s success.

Cash flow, resource management and timing are essential to the success of large-scale projects. Scheduling these projects well in advance is therefore critical to ensure that the necessary allocation of resources and cash will be available. If any project requires certain areas of the business to be disrupted or temporarily shut down, scheduling ensures that consider when would be most appropriate for the disruption to occur.

Scheduling the project in a predicted quiet period and organising a skeleton roster well in advance can save your business considerable cash.

Efficient Operations

Scheduling is essential for the efficient operation of any business. It is especially important however for large businesses, which may have multiple departments, managers, teams and locations to consider. In the business world, time truly is money. Preparation is key to ensure that specific tasks can be performed in a timely and efficient manner.

In order to ensure that your team runs like a well-oiled machine, your employees need to understand where they are required to be and what tasks they have been assigned to perform on any given day.

There are many ways that a carefully curated schedule improves the efficiency of your employees and operations. A successful schedule ensures that your employees spend their time wisely and that your business benefits from the uninterrupted and productive work of your team members.

Developing an employee schedule will ensure that the right number of team members are present during busy operation hours. This ensures that groups of people are not away on break during peak times and that there are enough people available to assist customers during busy periods.

If your employees are also required to move locations throughout a shift, a schedule ensures that your team members adhere to an appropriate transit time.

Conclusion

Having an organised schedule is essential for any large business to run efficiently. By investing in leading scheduling software, you can save your business from the considerable costs of disorganised management.