Generating Schedules

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At this point, it is assumed that you have completely set up your database. You should have one or more schedules that have usual workers marked as (Assign). To create a useable schedule, the next step is to generate the schedule. When you generate a schedule, the Scheduler will replace all items with a usual worker of (Assign) with a worker who is capable of performing that job.

The Scheduler has several rules that it uses to assign workers. The Scheduler will never assign a worker to perform more than one job per schedule. If the Scheduler has already assigned all of the users willing to perform a specific job, then the worker for that job will be left at (Assign) and you will have to manually choose a worker to perform that job. This may never occur if you have enough workers for every job that you have. Some smaller congregations may run across this situation often. If you find that the Scheduler is frequently leaving a job with (Assign) as the worker, then you may want to manually select a usual worker for that job before you generate the schedule.

The Scheduler will try not to assign each worker to more than one job per month. This may not always be possible, and if not, the Scheduler will assign workers multiple times in a month. What this means is that a worker may be assigned a job for each schedule in the month. As discussed earlier, the worker will not, however, be assigned to more than one job in a single schedule.

Now we are going to generate the Worship Services - Week 1 schedule. Figure 3.1 shows the Generate Workers for Selected Schedule menu item that is used to generate the schedule. Be sure that the correct schedule is highlighted before you click the menu item. Figure 3.2 shows the screen that you will see once you click the Generate Workers for Selected Schedule menu item. The Scheduler requires that you enter a schedule date. This date is used to enforce the rules that were just described. For our schedule, we will enter the date for Sunday of the scheduled week. This screen will accept any valid date format (i.e., 1/1/99; 01/01/1999; January 1, 1999).


Figure 3.1 Generate Workers for Selected Schedule



Figure 3.2 Schedule Starting Date Screen


Figure 3.3 shows the last items on our generated schedule. The Scheduler was able to select workers for every job except for one on our schedule. We did not set up many song leaders in our database and the Scheduler had already assigned all of those song leaders to other jobs.

You will notice that the caption of the screen says Revise Generated Schedule. Immediately after you generate a schedule, the Scheduler will open the schedule up so that you can see the workers that were selected. At this point you can change any worker for any job. This will not affect the usual workers that you set up in Chapter 2. Revisions made at this point will only effect the currently generated schedule. You can come back at any time to make revisions to this generated schedule. The second menu item shown in Figure 3.1 is Revise Generated Schedule. That is the menu item that you would select to revise this generated schedule at a later time. The changes that you make will remain in the database until the next time you select the Generate Workers for Selected Schedule menu item. When you do that, the Scheduler will select all new workers for the schedule, and any changes you made to the last generated schedule will be overwritten.


Figure 3.3 Generated Schedule


We are now going to manually pick a song leader for Sunday P.M. because the Scheduler was not able to pick one for us. We selected the Edit menu item from the Item menu. Figure 3.4 shows the screen that we used to select our Sunday P.M. song leader. Notice that the Job list is disabled. You can only change the assigned worker. The job was set up in Chapter 2. Jobs cannot be changed in generated schedules.


Figure 3.4 Changing Assigned Worker in a Generated Schedule