Employee scheduling software

Employee scheduling software automates the process of creating and maintaining a schedule. Automating the scheduling of employees increases productivity and makes many secretarial and manual scheduling positions obsolete. Such software will usually track vacation time, sick time, compensation time, and alert when there are conflicts. As scheduling data is accumulated over time, it may be extracted for payroll or to analyze past activity. Although employee scheduling software may or may not make optimization decisions, it does manage and coordinate the tasks. Today's employee scheduling software often includes mobile applications. Mobile scheduling further increased scheduling productivity and eliminated inefficient scheduling steps.

A theoretical underpinning of an employee scheduling problem can be represented as the Nurse scheduling problem, which is NP-hard. The theoretical complexity of the problem is a significant factor in the development of various software solutions. This is because systems must take into account many different forms of schedules that could be worked, and allocate employees to the correct schedule. Ultimately, optimization of scheduling is to minimize costs, but also often requires a reciprical approach from management instead of complete reliance on software.

Prior to employee scheduling software companies would use physical mediums for tracking employee hours and work schedule. This then gave rise to data storage forms that later by the 80s were compatible with computer programs and software. These forms however never actually scheduled the employees, it just kept track of the employees work week, hours, and prior work schedules. This then gave way to the idea of employee scheduling software, which would be an all inclusive system that would store and track employee work history, along with actually scheduling the employee's work week.

The earliest form of automated employee scheduling and managing of employee hours was the Punch Card. The idea first created by Basile Bouchon developed the control of a loom by punched holes in paper tape in 1725. Herman Hollerith improved the design. IBM manufactured and marketed a variety of unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after expanding into electronic computers in the late 1950s. IBM developed punched card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines.

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